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BELGIUM 
AND GERMANY 

A DUTCH VIEW 

(DE BELGISCHE NEUTRALITBIT GESCHONDEN) 



BY 

DR. J. H. LABBERTON 



TRANSLATED BY 

W. E. LEONARD 



CHICAGO LONDON 

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY 

1916 



.b3 



COPYRIGHT BY 

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPAN't 

1916 




'GIA42846? 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 

THERE seem three excellent reasons for making 
accessible to American readers this little study 
written in a relatively inaccessible tongue. 

1. It is fundamentally a study of those philosophic 
ideas which will have to be mastered before mankind 
shall be able to pronounce a rational and just verdict 
on the present crisis. And there is as yet, in the midst 
of the world's anger, amazement, prejudice, and re- 
crimination, all too little common effort to master 
them. The moral feeling of the whole human race 
was probably never before so profoundly alive as since 
the beginning of August 1914; but this excess of 
moral feeling, though it must in time deepen our 
insight, as having so deepened our experience, seems 
for the present to render moral thinking well-nigh im- 
potent. The new materials, the new emotions, are too 
overwhelming for the needful new formulations ; and, 
because as intellectual beings we must find some artic- 
ulate expression, something with subject and predicate 
whereby to objectify the inner stir, we have instinc- 
tively recourse to the old formulations. But this won't 
do forever. Our present routine application of moral 

[iii] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

formulas is not thinking at all, certainly not moral 
thinking. The formulas as such may be as valid as 
the binomial theorem; they may be founded in the 
moral consciousness, and tested in the racial experi- 
ence: but, if their symbols do not represent the facts, 
they can only confuse and retard. But some of the 
formulas themselves may need revision: it is not by 
any means certain, for instance, that all maxims of 
hoary antiquity, even when cited with approval by the 
leading American weeklies, are the last word on right- 
eousness in this world- war: they may be a downright 
libel not only on righteousness but on common sense 
— for in nothing is the race slower to see and to revise 
than in its ''proverbial philosophy." Dr. Labberton has 
made in two ways a conscientious effort to think: he 
has tried to realize the data in their individual, concrete 
reality; he has tried to work out formulas that shall 
truly interpret the data and truly satisfy the moral 
reason. I do not say he has altogether succeeded. I 
say only that he has tried; and that his effort should 
help,^ if only in a small way, to dissipate the present 
moral paradox of a morally bewildered world cocksure 
of its moral judgments. 

1 Note, too, Bertrand Russell's Justice in War Time, Open 
Court Publishing Co., 1916. But the most notable indication 
that our powers of moral thinking are coming back to us is to 
me John Dewey's masterly essay "On Understanding the Mind 
of Germany," Atlantic Monthly, February 1916, though, if 
space permitted, a number of other excellent publications might 
be mentioned that have appeared since the paragraph in the 
text was written — very different in insight, poise, and breadth 
from the astonishing superficialities of several very distin- 
guished Americans — stent nominum umbrae! — in the first year 
of the war. 

[iv] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

2. It is a study by a citizen of a neutral country,'* 
and, moreover, a neutral country which is in closest 
relationship of all neutral countries to the belligerents 
chiefly concerned in the discussion. I refer less to 
the close physical relationship, though this must play 
its vital part in bringing home the fearful realities of 
the war, — than to the still more important spiritual 
relationship. The educated Hollander — and Holland 
is a country of highly educated men and women — 
knows the literature, politics, and social life, through 
travel and study, of France, Germany, and England, 
as well — it is safe to say — as the average educated 
American knows any one of these three characteristic 
manifestations of any one of these three countries. 
And Dr. Labberton represents, moreover, a phase of 
the Dutch reaction to the present events. More than 
one Dutch writer has recently expressed (to use Lab- 
berton's perhaps irritating expression) his "personal 
faith in Germany's vocation" — "persoonlijk geloof in 
Diiitschlands roeping." And granted that this faith 
has yet to be justified, the significant point is that it 

2 Labberton is a doctor of law and a doctor of political econ- 
omy from the University of Groningen, where he was a pupil 
of the distinguished philosopher Professor Gerh. Heymans to 
whom his book so frequently refers. Mr. (= meester in de 
rechten, master of laws) Labberton is now an official of the 
Dutch government : chief of the third division of the provincial 
record office of Zeeland, His home is in Middelburg in Zee- 
land, near the Belgian boundary. Under the pseudonym "Theo- 
dore van Ameide" he has published three volumes of verse, 
which have been accorded high praise for thought, feeling and 
beauty of phrase and rhythm : Lof der Wijsheid, 1906 ; Ver- 
aamelde Gedichten, 1912; De Balkanstrijd, 1912. The present 
work is an admirable illustration of the fusing of the poet's 
insight with the discursive reason of the logical thinker. 

[v] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

exists in thoughtful Hollanders (as in thoughtful citi- 
zens of other neutral countries) like Dr. Labberton, — 
who are not physically or spiritually in the pay of Ger- 
many. And this is of at least equal significance with 
the faith in the moral debasement of Germany which 
has become almost a religious cult in some intellectual 
circles in America. Presumably it would be hard for 
either party to give altogether convincing reasons for 
its faith ; but there can be no doubt as to which party 
has on the whole the advantage in the prerequisites of 
knowledge, reflection, and poise. 

3. It is a study by a foreigner well read in German 
literature. This is of even greater significance than 
at first appears. Roman literature, for example, began 
and ended as an exotic flower, at its best symbolizing, 
as in Virgil, an imperial ideal of a small, aristocratic 
cult, or giving utterance, as in Catullus, to elemental 
personal passion. Or again, English literature, the 
most comprehensive, rich, deep, and harmoniously 
unfolding literature of mankind, has been the creation, 
as it were, of a long hereditary line, withdrawn, almost 
like the Egyptian priesthood, from the rest of the 
workers ; even when it has interpreted its people it 
has not been essentially of its people. It is a world, 
a wonderful world, but largely a world in itself, less 
national than universal in ideas, beauty, and power. 
And American literature seems, in the main, at its best 
an integral part of this hereditary line. But more 
than any literature with which I am acquainted, more 
even than the Italian, French, or Greek, German litera- 
ture is the organic, inevitable outgrowth and expres- 

[vi] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

sion of the folk mind and heart. It is peculiarly the 
national literature,^ as English is peculiarly the inter- 
national, "the world-literature." It is not to the point 
here to balance the intrinsic merits of each type: ob- 
viously the former will exert less influence outside its 
own national boundaries than the latter, and will need 
from time to time sympathetic foreign mediators, like 
Madame de Stael or Carlyle. But it is much to the 
point to emphasize that in the present crisis no one 
not spiritually well-read in German literature, so pre- 
eminently the reflection of the German spirit, can 
speak with the requisite wisdom on the Germany of 
yesterday, of to-day, and (presumably) of to-morrow, 
either in its temperament or in its institutions, or 
above all in its moral ideals of state and personality. 

Thus the translator asks a hearing for this Dutch 
presentation. He does not stand as official sponsor 
for its statements or reflections. As an American of 
entirely English descent, some things have cost him 
a kind of ancestral pain in the translation. But this is 
a time when all honest and thoughtful men should be 
accorded honest and thoughtful attention. If England, 
or rather a very small and very closed group in Down- 
ing Street, is proven culpable, it may grieve us, as it 
grieves some of us to-day to find America departing 

^ I mean, of course, "national" literature in an ethnic, not a 
political sense, as voicing with peculiar intimacy the customs, 
words, thoughts, and all the manifestations of life we call 
German. The fact that Goethe and Herder, for instance, 
preached the ideal of a world-literature, and the fact that the 
Germans absorb so readily the literature of other countries 
are to me really no disproof of the contention: these very 
phenomena reflect a characteristic element in the German out- 
look on the world. 

[vii] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

(as it seems) from her best rational and moral ideals; 
but it would not be honest or thoughtful for us to 
spare ourselves the possible grief by refusing to in- 
quire, impartially and fearlessly, for ourselves, or by 
refusing to grant, yes and to further, freedom of in- 
quiry and speech for others. 

We must say with Aristotle (in the Nichomachean 
Ethics) : "Friends and truth are both dear to us, 
but it is a sacred duty to prefer truth" [i. e., what 
seems truth to us]. And whilst millions of men are 
suffering pain, sorrow and death across the seas in 
defense of what each believes is the truth, shall not 
we be willing to risk something? For this greatest 
and most tragic of all wars is essentially a war of 
ideas ;** and in this sense it is and must be, a "world- 
war": in which every man of ideas, outside the phys- 
ical belligerents, must sooner or later play his part — 
let us hope, a manful and chivalrous part. 

William Ellery Leonard. 



* The Swede Steffen finds it a "war of imperialism," the 
Engh'shman Russell a "war of prestige," and others stress one 
or another economic or political factor; but back of all lay 
from the beginning unreconciled (not .necessarily irreconcil- 
able!) worlds of thought, which have become more and more 
consciously conceived and developed as the war has gone on. 
Nor are the thought-elements tnere "afterthoughts" — as if 
merely the belated effort of man's intellect to give some re- 
spectability to man's brutality. But this calls for a chapter — 
not a footnote. 



[viii] 



NOTE. 



Acknowledgments must be made to Mr. B. Q. Morgan and 
to Mr. Arnold Dresden (formerly of Amsterdam) for help in 
the translation, and to my wife for some drudgery in the prep- 
aration for the press. Mr. Friedrich Bruns kindly assisted in 
collating the English proof sheets with the proof sheets of the 
German translation (by Frl. Dr. Johanna Riigeberg, Berlin, 
Carl Curtius, 1916, under the title Die sittliche Berechtigung 
der Verletzung der belgischen Neutralitdt, with an introduction 
by Prof. K. D. Biilbring), which, as having been personally re- 
vised and improved by Dr. Labberton, is in effect a second 
edition. I am, however, responsible for all defects ; but, with 
the exception of slight condensations — amounting altogether 
to a page or so, — I trust I have rendered the author's ideas 
and style as nearly as is practicable in a language so radically 
different in atmosphere and structure. My few notes — chiefly 
explanatory of the text — are in brackets. The more important 
of the numerous quotations from the prose of other languages 
(French, German and Latin, besides English), always given by 
Labberton in the original, appear in this edition as Englished 
by the translator of the Dutch. Verse, with one exception, is 
left untranslated. W. E. L. 



[ix] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY. 

"The peculiar virtue of the German has 
from time immemorial found expression in 
his tendency to solve acute practical ques- 
tions in connection with the profoundest 
principles and thus to unite the temporal 
and the eternal." — August Dorner, Politik, 
Recht und Moral mit Besiehung auf den 
gegenwdrtigen Krieg, p. 1. 

OF the tremendous historical events which it is 
to-day our privilege to witness, — a privilege 
but seldom duly appreciated, — there is perhaps none 
of such far-reaching significance as the fate that has 
overtaken Belgium. For this makes a strong and 
immediate appeal to the moral consciousness; and 
virtually compels a moral judgment of vast scope 
and range. The first impression is, undoubtedly, in 
the highest degree unfavorable to Germany, and 
England has left nothing undone to strengthen and 
confirm that impression. Her statesmen, excellent 
and clever judges of human nature, know well 
enough that for most people first impressions are 
lasting impressions, that the mass of mankind can 

[1] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

neither see nor think, and that nothing is so sure to 
take effect as an appeal to its ethical instinct, at least 
in the business of shaping that usually rather ex- 
ternal phenomenon known as public opinion. It is 
truly extraordinary how hugely virtuous we all are 
in our public judgments of others, and especially on 
paper. In the inner reality perhaps our moral sense 
turns out to be a rather small affair ; in the market- 
place righteous indignation commonly prevents re- 
flection. 

' I see no risque d'honneurm the confession that 
I myself was in the beginning somewhat under the 
influence of the English presentation of the case: 
even so cautious and discriminating a critic ^s Pro- 
fessor Heymans^ seems to imply Germany's crime 
when he refers to the justice of the Belgian cause 
on page 8 of his brochure, De oorlog en de vredes- 
heweging [''The War and the Peace Movement"]. 
Yet I soon felt how improbable, after all, it was 
that a great people like the Germans should really 
be sunk so low. Thus, too, I soon felt it my duty 
to investigate and test my initial judgment. With 
the publication of that investigation, I desire to do 
my modest part in the service of truth and right. 

^ [The distinguished philosopher at Groningen.] 



[2] 



THE English bill of indictment (English "White 
Book," No. 1 59) has it that Germany refused to 
abide by a treaty '*to which Germany is as much 
a party as ourselves."^ The reference is to article 7 
of the London treaty of 1839, whereby, with Eng- 
land, France, Prussia, Russia, and Austria as gua- 
rantors, Belgium was declared to be an independent 
and pennanently neutral state, on her part obligated 
to preserve her neutrality toward all other states. 
When this treaty was concluded, its primary pur- 
pose, the direct outgrowth of preceding historical 
events, was to prevent France from sending her 
troops through Belgium; in so far, the treaty took 
the place of the Barriere Treaty, which had con- 
trolled the situation during the eighteenth century. 
Furthermore, it is worth noting that this principle 
was established, not in the interests of Belgium, but 
in the interests of the great powers. 

This is recognized by such unimpeachable wit- 
nesses as the authors of Why We Are at War, Ox- 

1 [Cited by Labberton in Dutch, and retranslated.] 

[3] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

ford, 1914: page 13, ''for the convenience of 
Europe"; page 14, *'It was in their interest, rather 
than her own, that the great powers made her a 
sovereign independent state." 

Under the stipulation Belgium acquired only 
duties, no claims of her own. The powers pledged 
themselves simply to one another. 

When on the second of August, 1914, Germany 
requested Belgium to permit the passage of the 
German army into France, Germany was already at 
war with two of the guarantors, Russia and France, 
and in most strained relations with the third, Eng- 
land. In his admirable book, Bijdrage tot de zvor- 
dingsgeschiedenis van den grooten oorlog ["Con- 
tributions to the History of the Origin of the Great 
War"], M. P. C. Valter says (p. 62) that under the 
existing circumstances the treaty must be considered 
as nullified ipso facto. Moreover, he seems to be 
practically of the opinion that the treaty, on the 
ground of its original historic intention, was bind- 
ing for France, but not for Germany. But I think 
his pro-German zeal has seriously misled him in 
both points. Inasmuch as Germany and France 
were now in a state of war, all treaties between the 
two countries were, according to the established law 
of nations, thereby nullified, and among them the 
treaty of 1839. But Germany was not at war with 
England on the 4th of August, and the fact that 
war was imminent has no bearing on the status of 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

treaties. Thus there existed on the 4th of August 
a formally valid treaty obligation on the part of 
Germany toward England to respect the neutrality 
of Belgium; nor is this altered by the historical in- 
tention of the agreement, since the terms were en- 
tirely general. This obligation was not fulfilled by 
Germany. 

It is solely upon this illegality that England rests 
her case. Read the first chapter of IV hy We Are 
at War, and you will see that nothing else, literally 
nothing, is adduced to buttress the accusation. The 
formal violation is affirmed, and the comment im- 
mediately follows : 'Tt is unnecessary to elaborate 
further the point of law" (p. 19).^ 

2 The Belgian Minister of State, J. van den Heuvel, confines 
himself to an equally bare formal treatment in his pamphlet, 
Het schcnden van de Belgische neiitraliteit, and similarly the 
Parisian expert in international law, Andre Weiss, La violation 
de la neutralite beige et luxe mb our geoise ; further the Ameri- 
can, James M. Beck, The Case of Belgium, Dutch translation 
by W. de Veer and H. W. Massingham, Waarom Engeland 
Belgi'e te hulp gekomen is. 



[5] 



n. 



NOW there is surely something more to be said ; 
but we must delve deeper. That the situation 
of August 1914 was in every respect totally different 
from that of 1839 when the treaty was concluded, 
will presumably be conceded without further argu- 
ment. For any one who consistently supports the 
doctrine that any treaty is alone valid under the un- 
expressed, but well understood, conditions, rebus sic 
stantibus, Germany's further obligation is obviously 
canceled. But this doctrine is itself unsatisfactory 
to me. 

The question of the binding power of treaties is 
in my opinion not a legal, but a purely ethical one. 
If we ask ourselves, what is the relation between 
law and morality, we arrive at something like the 
following. In law we find, first of all, a great sub- 
stratum which is mere organization, social tech- 
nology, arrangement and rule — for such there must 
be. Here belongs first of all, though by no means 
alone, all that lies within the wide compass of merely 
formal law. This part of law is ethically indifferent. 

[6] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

Next come those legal provisions which, with refer- 
ence to family and property (civil law), and to per- 
sonal conduct (criminal law), insure an ethical 
minimum, that is to say, such small degree of (out- 
ward) morality as the community must demand of 
its m.embers for its very existence and for the possi- 
bility of the development of a free and higher ethical 
life, and hence cannot afford to entrust entirely to 
the uncertain workings of the individual moral con- 
sciousness. We do not need to assume a special "legal 
consciousness" to explain the existence of this part 
of law; we have here merely our common moral 
consciousness plus the necessity of establishing a 
minimum, if need be by compulsion. The ''legal 
consciousness" is in fact nothing but the "moral 
consciousness" operating in the spheres of life here 
under consideration. 

Who gives law its compelling character, its power ? 
The state. But what assurance is there that the 
state will put its power at the service of the true, 
the morally just law? With this question we come 
upon the deepest problems of ethics and the philos- 
oph}^ of law, which it is impossible to enter into here. 
Suffice it, that there can be no law, unless there is 
some power to insure its operation. That we often 
seem to doubt so elementary a truth, is due, I believe, 
simply to the ambiguity in the use of the word right 
[reclit], which means now the positive, statutory 



[7] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

law, and now the desired ideal/ We must realize 
clearly that there is but one law [recht] , the positive 
law, and that the Right [Recht] in the sense of the 
ethically just, the ideal right, belongs not to this 
actual world but to the realm of ethical ideals, unless 
that Right be incorporated in the positive law — 
which is possible but by no means always the case. 

And now the so-called law of nations. Here, too, 
there is first a part which is merely organization, as 
the law of envoys and the rules governing the formal 
vahdity of treaties. It is ethically indifferent; it 
depends on custom and agreement; and, because it 
is of such importance and conflicts with no specific 
interests of state, it is strictly and quite voluntarily 
observed by all parties. In the second place come 
all those arrangements undertaken by sovereign 
states with respect to concrete interests, — for in- 
stance the use of Belgian territory for purposes of 
war. These treaties we cannot call contracts in the 
legal sense, since there is no power on earth that 
looks after their fulfilment. They are best to be 
compared to the voluntary promises made to each 
other by individuals, the fulfilment of which is not 
a legal but a moral duty. The punishment for non- 
fulfilment is in the main moral condemnation, — the 

^ 1 [The ambiguity in English, though analogous, works out a 
little differently. We don't use "right" (Dutch recht) in the 
sense of statutory law.] 

[81 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

weight of which, even practically, must not be under- 
estimated. It is on this account important to empha- 
size the exclusively ethical character of the obliga- 
tion, since it will then follow that, as to the scope of 
our obligations, we do not have to resort to legal 
reasoning (based, for instance, on the conception of 
sovereignty), but have to turn exclusively and di- 
rectly to our own unmediated ethical understanding. 
In the third place, there are all those formula- 
tions of moral rules of conduct, with respect to a 
given subject matter, as the Hague conventions of 
1907 and the declarations of Paris and London con- 
cerning the law of naval warfare. Here, too, is not a 
trace of legal compulsion : they are but moral codes. 
At least that is what they pretend to be, often for a 
fact quite unwarrantably, as in the case of the law of 
prizes at sea, where the stronger party simply formu- 
lates its will, or, again, wdiere inexperience and illu- 
sion set up as rules of conduct what are still very 
remote or in practice absolutely impossible ideals." 
International law differs from national, in addition 
to the absence of compulsory power, chiefly in the 
fact that it gives not an ethical minimum, but the 
full measure of what is regarded as moral: it is the 
codified morality of states, with all the advantages 

2 The almost childlike disappointment of Prof. A. A. H. 
Struycken in De Oorlog en het Volkenrecht results exclusively 
from this overestimation of the actual content of the rules 
above referred to. Cf. Steinmetz, Philosophie des Krieges, pp. 
333-334, and Dragomirof, Les his de la guerre in the publica- 
tions of the Vereeniging voor Krijgswetenschap, 1897. 

[9] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

and all the great disadvantages involved in a codi- 
fication of what is essentially freedom. 

Our question is now : what binding power is there 
to international agreements of the kind mentioned 
under point (2) ? Does the moral consciousness 
demand that the agreements be lived up to? The 
question runs exactly parallel to this : does the moral 
consciousness demand that individuals keep their 
promises ? 



[10] 



III. 



IT will perhaps be asked, — although I have af- 
firmed only a parallel, not a likeness, — if states 
in their intercourse may be morally judged exactly 
as individuals. The question usually amounts to 
this: whether politics have actually anything to do 
with morals. For the answer I would merely refer 
the inquirer to the moral consciousness itself, which 
appears to react indubitably upon the actions of 
states in quite the same way as upon those of indi- 
viduals. This is the gist of the matter — ab esse 
ad posse valet conclusio. (For the rest read in 
the first part of von Treitschke's Politik the fine 
chapter on the relation of politics to morality, 
which will serve, moreover, to give one a just esti- 
mate of the current craze for decrying this writer — 
and with him virtually all Prussia — as suffering 
from complete moral atrophy. I present below, by 
the way, some objections to his reasoning.)^ At 

1 Compare August Dorner, Politik, Recht und Moral mit Be- 
ziehung auf den gegenwdrtigen Krieg, a most instructive 
little book. Indeed it is generally very striking how much 
higher the German war-literature ranks than the English and 
French. 

[11] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

the same time it will appear later that in some cases 
a judgment on the actions of states will necessarily 
turn out otherwise than a judgment on individuals — 
a difference, moreover, which to some degree ex- 
plains the origin of the notion that politics and ethics 
have no relation with each other. 

How then does our moral consciousness operate? 
What is the object of a moral judgment? What 
conditions must be fulfilled in order to pronounce a 
moral judgment?" 

That which is essentially judged is never the act 
as such, but the character which thereby reveals it- 
self. Therefore, the first condition for pronouncing 
a moral judgment is that the act be fully know^n and 
clearly realized in its distinctive concreteness, with 
all the motivating circumstances; the second, that 
the case in question be of a kind that admits a trust- 
worthy deduction from act and motives as to char- 
acter. Such is not the case — according to Professor 
Heymans,^ pp. 65-81 — when physical force or loss 
of consciousness has wholly unlinked the character 
from the chain of causes of the action; it is in a 
smaller measure the case wdien psychical force or 
undue persuasion has introduced overpowering mo- 
tives, or when immature years, mental weakness, 
or an overpowering emotion renders the psychic 

- Cf. Heymans, Einfuhrung in die Ethik, pp. 33-138. 
^ Einfiihrung in die Ethik. 

[12] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

course abnormal, so that the common assumption, 
that all the circumstances were known to the persons 
acting and as motives influenced their decision, no 
longer holds good. Furthermore, provocation, temp- 
tation, intoxication, hypnosis, seduction, one-sided 
training, are all named in this same connection. 
Finally there are various cases of pS3^chic aberra- 
tions. All is to be eliminated which does not belong 
to "the true nature of the personality willing, the 
fundamental law of one's nature, the measure by 
which one appraises the various ultimate aims of the 
action, in short, one's character."* All factors in 
the action which do not belong to the character are, 
for a moral judgment, quite indifferent. 

Therefore, if a state in its acts is to be judged 
morally, it must be a "person" — "human beings or 
entities conceived as like human beings" (Heymans, 
p. 34) — with a definite "character." This is cer- 
tainly the case. What is the state, when we attempt 
to grasp its essential nature, apart from all theory, 
but one phase of the folk itself, namely, the practical, 
acting side of the folk-life, combining as a unit, in 
order to conduct as a unit its activities at home and 
abroad. The state belongs altogether in the sphere 
of the practical will. In this sphere the moral ideal 
prevails as the directing aim. From this follows 
inevitably the moral vocation of the state, expressing 
itself in the realization of justice both in its internal 
* Heymans, loc. cit., p. 81. 

[13] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

and in its external affairs. Its conduct abroad 
toward other states in diplomacy and war is in the 
end also nothing but the realization of right — a 
realization in that unending process of the historical 
development of the mutual relations of the various 
peoples which, as in agreement with their worth, is 
exacted by the moral ideal. ^ From this it follows, 
moreover, that the state has no actual governing 
vocation in theoretical fields (science, religion) : it 
can promote, but it cannot direct. Its exclusively 
practical power does not extend into our inner life. 

The state is, therefore, the centralized practical 
power of a people, a might, which can set for itself 
all conceivable practical ends, but which, in and be- 
yond these, sets itself, as prompted by its very na- 
ture, at the service of the moral ideal, and, in so far 
as it strives through that power to realize morality, 
creates law and right. 

It is, therefore, beyond doubt a person with a 
moral vocation and its character can and will be 
judged according to the measure with which it ful- 
fils that vocation. But the moral judgment must, 
as always, reckon with all the factors, which in 
every concrete case have to be taken into account in 
order to draw any certain conclusion from an action 
as to character. There exists no moral code, no set 

5 Read the fine reflections of Reinhold Seeberg on "Das sitt- 
liche Recht des Krieges" ['The Moral Right of War"] in the 
Internationale Monatsschrift fiir Wissenschaft, Kunst tind Tech- 
nik, Nov. 1, 1914. 

[14] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

of rules, from which we can deduce, according to 
specific law, whether any given action is good or bad. 
The moral consciousness knows no good or bad 
actions ; it knows only good or bad characters. One 
and the same action can be at one time approved, 
at another condemned, — all depends upon a full 
knowledge of the given case, its concrete delimita- 
tions, its various attending factors. Cum duo fa- 
ciunt idem, non est idem. 

Now what factors come especially to the fore in 
a moral judgment on a state, as distinct from a 
judgment on individuals? 

If we bear in mind the elements, previously 
summed up, which hinder or complicate the deduction 
of character from an action, we will see plainly that 
the first, the subjective, prerequisite of a just judg- 
ment — full and complete knowledge on the judger's 
part of the given case in all its concrete delimitations 
— is far more difBcult to realize in regard to the 
actions of states than in regard to the actions of 
individuals. Moderation and caution are thus a 
primary requirement, — always, but here in partic- 
ular. '7^^<^fe^ I'^ot' that ye be not judged," — that is, 
that your judgment itself may not appear an ethical 
offense. It is here especially that a clear, impartial, 
objective alignment of all the elements of the given 
case will be hampered in the judger's mind, for 
strong sympathies and antipathies, or the interests 



[15] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

of one's own country, necessarily lead to a one-sided 
sifting of the data. 

And there is another disturbing influence, the 
gigantic dimensions which the results of a state's 
action can take on, and the tremendous power with 
w^iich these results can affect the emotional side of 
our personality. This, too, may vastly contribute 
to confuse our vision and thus to render a complete 
survey of the whole well-nigh impossible. We are, 
indeed, all too much inclined to let our attention 
dwell alone on the most emotional complex. Be- 
cause of that one decision resolved upon by Ger- 
many, we now see all Belgium in a situation which 
no man with human feelings can look upon without 
a bleeding heart, quite aside from the causes and the 
question of guilt. Yet we must possess in our men- 
tal make-up something more than a bleeding heart, 
in order to reflect — or at least after a spell to begin 
again to reflect — that the matter has still other 
aspects. And our chance for a correct judgment 
is still slighter when our mood becomes interesting 
for its own sake and flatters our vanity — the essence 
of sentimentality. 

All this concerns, however, entirely the subjec- 
tive conditions of a right judgment: it is in no 
sense asserted that an action of a state also differs 
objectively in its moral aspects from the action of 
an individual. If we consider the objective factors, 
it can then be said, I think, that overpowering emo- 

[16] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

tion, provocation, temptation, and one-sided train- 
ing often play a big role in causing the actions of 
states, and thus in fairness deserve to be taken into 
account. 

In the same connection the psychology of the mob 
should be reckoned with, in so far as a strong and 
homogeneous public opinion can reduce a state and 
its instrumentalities into a condition of psychic com- 
pulsion or undue persuasion. It seems to me both 
theoretically unsound and practically much exag- 
gerated to treat the state, as does A. Christensen 
in Politik nnd Massemnoral [''Politics and Mob- 
morality"], 1912, as itself nothing but a ''mob," and 
to explain thus the often low moral level of its 
actions. The will of the state is for me the more 
high, abiding, reasoning folk-will, la volonte gene- 
rale, purified of the baser alloys which characterize 
the decisions of the will of the mob, la volonte de 
fans; precisely as in individuals a lower natural 
will is to be distinguished from the higher spiritual 
will that obtains zvhen they put on the brakes. The 
question as to the best — or least bad — form of 
government is in part the question how this put- 
ting on the brakes can, in the large, be best accom- 
plished. 

The power exercised by public opinion upon the 
will of the state must not be overestimated. In the 
first place it is usually divided against itself and 

[17] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

thus neutralized in its operation; secondly, it is in 
part moulded by the instrumentalities of the state 
itself in harmony with the state's own purposes. 
Note what is at the present moment taking place in 
Italy and the neutral Balkan states : despite all out- 
cries, the governm.ents are calmly going their way. 
Only when the matter to be judged is so vital and 
elementary that an entire people forms instinctively 
one common opinion does the pressure become irre- 
sistible (as the German opinion of England's atti- 
tude). But then we have again a parallel with 
another phenomenon in individuals : sometimes in 
a supreme moment a deep vital instinct, above and 
beyond the discursive reason, can and must lead the 
way. 

But now how are we to explain the fact that a 
state's morality is lower than an individual's? It 
seems to me that we would do well to examine first 
whether or no the fact is in reality as asserted, and 
then whether or no certain errors of observation 
have been committed here. We should not forget 
that the actions of a state, far more than those of 
private persons, lie open to common view and by their 
very magnitude inevitably attract our attention. I 
venture to doubt for my part whether the naturally 
sinful heart of man, in its secret deeds and desires, 
rises so very far above the level of states. We must 
not confuse theoretical and actual morality. 

Further, in all these objective factors it is as yet 

[18] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

altogether only a question of quantitative differences 
from the judgment on an individual. If the state 
is properly to lay claim to essentially qualitative dif- 
ferences, there must be adduced some constant ele- 
ment which distinguishes it as an agent always and 
everywhere from the individual. Von Treitschke 
believes he can adduce such an element. For him 
the essence of the state lies in power {de niacht], 
and concern for its power is its highest, its absolute 
duty. He adds, however, "that the acquired power 
must justify itself, by being used for the highest 
moral good of mankind" {Politik, 1897, I, p. 91). 
It appears then that the way in which the power is 
acquired is, according to von Treitschke, ethically 
indifferent; and that only the way in which it is 
used is subject to ethical judginent. The state in 
its actions is thus continually, or at least a good part 
of the time, virtually in a moral conflict: all further 
duties have to give way as soon as they clash with 
"the unconditional duty of self-preservation" (p. 
103). "A sacrifice for a foreign people is not only 
not moral, but contradicts the idea of self-affirma- 
tion [Selbstbehauptung], which is for the state its 
highest ideal." I believe I may say that this theory, 
as here so broadly and absolutely presented, is con- 
demned by the unmediated moral consciousness, al- 
though it seems only too often to be in accord with 
the actual practice of states. The theory is also 
logically unsatisfactory. It is itself contradictory 

[19] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

to the definition of the state given by von Treitschke 
himself, namely : "3. people rightly united as an 
independent power." In the definition the people is 
properly made primary, not the power. The state is 
a phase of the people ; the power is its attribute, not 
its being. That the preservation and acquisition of 
power is the direct outgrowth of its nature is thus 
not true. The people that, in and through its state, 
makes power the end to which all else is subordi- 
nated acts not through necessity, by virtue of an 
inescapable organic impulse, but simply out of pure 
egotism, and hence not morally. The assurance 
that the might so acquired is to be used in the ser- 
vice of morality does not seem then the most certain. 
Indeed, the ethical vocation of the state appears to 
be, in von Treitschke's exposition, without inner 
connection with its nature. 

An individual, says von Treitschke, may sacrifice 
himiself for something higher; but in the case of the 
state there is nothing higher. Yet how comes it 
then that the state too is morally bound? The 
moral ideal is after all higher than the state. And for 
the individual one could prove in the same manner 
that the duty of self-preservation is "unconditional" 
[German, tmbedingf]. The state is the united will 
of the people and as such a concentration of power; 
and no less is the practical part of a vigorous, strong- 
willed personality a center of energy, an independent 
power inside the boundaries of law. Does it follow 

[20] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

then that the power has the moral right to permit 
itself unrestrained exercise inside those boundaries, 
regardless of what its purposes may be ? The moral 
consciousness is not for a moment in doubt: the 
answer is a decided negative. 

And therefore the duty of self-preservation is in 
the end likewise for the state not "unconditional," 
since the state is in reality nothing but one of the 
forms in which the population of a definite territory 
lives its life. If this state, if this form vanishes, 
not so the folk. It is even quite possible that it will 
fiind, in other forms — say, as a part of a greater 
state — much better advantages for the practical, 
moral side of its being. This is convincingly evi- 
denced for instance in the absorbtion of the number- 
less little German states into the German Empire. 
Is it likely that von Treitschke himself would ever 
have meant that the little states before 1870 had an 
"unconditional duty of self-preservaton" — he who 
proclaimed, with a measure of truth, a small statf 
as "something ridiculous"? 

Yet the theory has in my eyes a large kernel of 
truth, which comes to light when we apply the 
necessary limitations. At the same time, it will 
appear that even the element which we are to get at 
in this way creates no qualitative difference between 
the judgment on a state and the judgment on an 
individual. Before going further into the matter — 

[21] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

a discussion better deferred to a later chapter — let 
us now return to our question, which I hope has 
not been lost sight of in this long but unavoidable 
digression: what is the binding force of promises? 
Is it unlimited, or are there restrictions? 



[22] 



IV. 



AT first glance one will presumably be inclined to 
Jr\, call this force unlimited. "A man a man, a word 
a word." But Faust, when on the point of closing 
his bargain with the devil, says, as a written guaran- 
tee is demanded of him: 

"Ist's nicht genug, dass mein gesprochnes Wort 
Auf ewig soil mit meinen Tagen schalten? 
Rast nicht die Welt in alien Stromen fort, 
Und mich soil ein Versprechen halten? 
Doch dieser Wahn ist uns ins Herz gelegt; 
Wer mag sich gern davon befreien? 
Begliickt, wer Treue rein im Busen tragt, 
Kein Opfer wird ihn je gereuen!" 

Is it not clear from these words that Faust, in 
spite of the high ethical worth of "good faith," yet 
feels this life-long promise as an unnatural, an un- 
just compulsion? And shall we not, in spite of his 
further asseveration, — 

"Nur keine Furcht, dass ich dies Biindnis breche, 
Das Streben meiner ganzen Kraft 
Ist grade das, was ich verspreche," — 

Still be able to call the whole poem, among other 
things, the story of how in the end, notwithstanding 

[23] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

the fulfilment of the stipulation, the devil neverthe- 
less did not get his share, since, not Faust, but the 
moral order of the universe itself, prevented such 
an outcome? 

One need not look long in the modern literature 
of scientific ethics for a definitive treatment of the 
problem. One will find it in that justly popular 
book of Th. Lipps, Die ethischen Gnindfragen 
["Principles of Ethics"], pp. 152-167. Following 
Kant closely in the essence of the matter — and in 
his results approximating the position of Professor 
Heymans — Lipps has formulated as the highest 
maxim : "So act that you can be true to yourself" — 
which is, as he immediately adds, not the same as 
"Always remain true to yourself." Were we ra- 
tionally and morally perfect, then we could and 
might be always true to ourselves. But we are 
frail creatures, and thus in some later, riper period, 
loyalty to ourselves may have to give way before 
the higher loyalty to truth and right. Even with 
respect to ourselves we must be able to say : Amicus 
Socrates, sed magis arnica Veritas (et virtus). In 
such a case of disloyalty one can deserve moral 
blame, yet "not on account of the disloyalty, but 
solely because I so acted that I had to be thereafter 
untrue to myself, that is, because I had promised 
or sworn what / had no right to promise or swear" 
(p. 153). In such a case for one to remain true to 



[24] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

oneself would be to add a still greater wrong to the 
one already committed. 

Two factors combine in the non-keeping of prom- 
ises: The one is to be observed in the abandoning 
of a previous opinion or judgment, the other in 
lying. 

An opinion once held has its after-effects within 
us, and forms the tendency to perpetuate itself. The 
realization that it must be given up balks that ten- 
dency. This is painful ; we are ashamed of our error, 
— all the more, the more it is our nature to be loyal 
toward ourselves. There is in us an inertia, a hold- 
ing to the past, a ''loyalty," however different its 
strength in different individuals. (I call attention 
here to the concept of the secondary function.) In 
this loyalty there rests something valuable, a gen- 
uine force. Yet this becomes a weakness, when it 
leads to closing our eyes to the better insight; for 
then the higher virtue of truthfulness toward our- 
selves and toward others is wrongfully subordinated 
to loyalty to the past, — which cramps and shrivels 
the soul. We then remain true to the poor, narrow 
personality of an earlier day, kill our sense of truth, 
and fail to reach the richer, freer, more ethical per- 
sonality, which we could otherwise have achieved. 
It may be that we console ourselves in idle self- 
praise with phrases about the right of our "indi- 
viduality." To this Lipps answers (p. 161) : "Cer- 
tainly there is a right of individuality. Every indi- 

[25] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

viduality has that right in proportion to the measure 
of the positive human quaHties it contains. Every 
element of strength and greatness in a man is valu- 
able and has its right to its place in the sum-total of 
his personality. But this means at the same time 
that all right of individuality is relative, and only 
that personality which is ethically complete and ab- 
solutely rich in content possesses an absolute right." 

If one possesses the freedom that is ready to 
abandon the delimited personality of the present in 
the cause of the richer and more ethical personality 
with the power of truth, then an unlimited loyalty 
to one's own past is out of the question — for the 
very reason that this is disloyalty toward one's own 
better self. 

Lying is also disloyalty toward one's self. For 
by our speech we ourselves give the hearer the con- 
sciousness of our own will, so that he believes and 
trusts he is hearing our real thoughts in our words. 
Thus we impose upon ourselves the obligation to 
say what we think, and, at the same time, by our 
lying fail to meet the self-imposed obligation. So 
at bottom we repudiate ourselves, and do conscious 
wrong to our own self-conscious life. Hence the 
deep feeling of degradation and shame that accom- 
panies the lie — the deeper, the sounder and more 
vigorous one's life at the core. Lying is a sign of 
weakness, of lack of respect for one's self and 
others; a sign too of superficiality and thoughtless- 

[26] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

ness, since it seems of no moment to the liar what 
men believe and know. 

But yet is every lie such a sign? No. Higher 
duties may conflict with the duty of truthfulness and 
gain the upper hand, as humanitarianism and con- 
cern for ends of greater worth and range. But even 
then a lie is a lie, though none the less the moral 
judgment acquits us. "In lying, too, the real object 
of ethical evaluation is not the deed, but the entirety 
of the mental content^ from which, in a given case, 
it originates." 

Now both factors — loyalty to our own past and 
loyalty to that trust in our truthfulness which we 
have ourselves aroused in others — come together in 
the obligation to keep the promises we have given, 

This obligation, therefore, shares to the full the 
scope of the two obligations which compose it. 
Here, too, the present can make demands before 
which loyalty to the past has to yield. Here, too, 
factors can enter which compel the loyalty and 
truthfulness toward others to retire before the 
duties of still higher ethical worth. *lf I can, I am 
in such a case in duty bound to take back my prom- 
ise in express terms, that is, to remove that belief 
in my original volition. But if I cannot do this, I 
must nevertheless perform what I have perceived to 
be right, regardless of the contradiction of my prom- 
ise. The condemnation falls then not on the omis- 
sion of the thing promised, but on the promise itself 

[27] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

made without sufficient reflection or foresight" (p. 
168). 

Thus there can exist a moral duty to break a 
promise : or, more exactly, a higher moral duty can 
set aside the duty to keep a promise. There is then 
an ethical conflict. We saw how this can arise: 
neither loyalty toward one's own past nor loyalty 
toward one's own declarations of the moment is ab- 
solutely obligatory. Consequently, both the non- 
keeping of a previously given promise and the con- 
scious giving of a promise that we do not intend to 
keep^ are under specific circumstances morally de- 
fensible. The "circumstances" may be comprehended 
in these general terms : the presence of a still higher 
ethical duty than that of good faith and truthfulness. 

1 [This is not a logical non-sequitur, but a well-considered 
reference to lying as before discussed.] 



[28] 



WE may now draw some conclusions as to the 
mutual promises which those persons called 
states make to each other when they establish a 
treaty. Whether the case of an ethically defensible 
conscious falsehood ever appears also in the prom- 
ises of states, is to me doubtful ; yet, in view of the 
extent to which the complications of the actually 
possible contingencies inevitably exceed our grasp, 
is as little to be categorically denied. In any case 
it is here beside the mark, for the pending suit ob- 
viously belongs under the first rubric: disloyalty 
toward one's own past. 

When is the disloyalty ethically defensible? We 
can now answer: whenever a higher ethical duty 
renders it unavoidable, — in other words, whenever 
the living present utters commands of so high and 
imperative a character that the past and the ethical 
command of loyalty to that past must give way be- 
fore them. Does this not amount to the doctrine 
of the rebtis sic stantibus? No. That doctrine de- 
mands, as it appears to me, on the one side more, 

[29] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

on the other side less than can be approved by the 
unmediated moral consciousness, which is here alone 
the point involved. The point is not that the status 
quo at the moment of concluding the treaty has been 
changed — for this is a condition which, taken strictly, 
is in truth being fulfilled all the time, since reality 
never for two instants remains exactly the same. 
No, but that change must have originated a higher 
ethical duty. If, on the other hand, the duty orig- 
inates rebus stantibus, then the treaty-obligation 
gives way none the less, however much, relatively 
speaking, things are as they were. 

We have already seen this above in Lipps : though 
one could not and dared not act otherwise, there 
yet remains in such cases an element of moral guilt ; 
the guilt, however, attaches not to the action of the 
moment, but to the promise of the past. Hence, 
moreover, the requirement that one shall take back 
the promise as soon as possible, — which, in the case 
of a state, means it shall declare on its part as soon 
as possible that it no longer regards itself as bound 
by the treaty. 

Now as to these two points, I think we can con- 
fidently maintain that the acting state operates under 
entirely different circumstances than an individual, 
and thus has a claim to special considerations. We 
have sought above in vain for a general, a constant 
differentia that should play a part in each moral 
judgment on the actions of states ; but here we may 

[30] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

admit such an element in a moral judgment passed 
specifically on the breaking of treaties. For the 
great difference between the promise of a state and 
of a single person is quite obvious. It lies in this, 
that "the sufficient reflection or foresight," de- 
manded by Lipps for the promise, is in the instance 
of a treaty often infinitely harder to achieve than 
in that of an individual promise, as a result, in part, 
of the far-reaching scope of the state's promise, in 
part, of the unlimited time for which it is given. 
No man of sound understanding will take it amiss 
that Germany in 1839 did not foresee the contin- 
gencies of 1914. There can be simply no question 
here of the heedless awakening of trust; indeed 
even in most cases of individuals it appears at least 
doubtful. 

Again, as to the second point, the taking back of 
promises, the state is in an entirely different position 
from a private person. If Germany had announced 
a few years ago that in the event of a war she might 
not be so situated as to respect the neutrality of 
Belgium, that action, which abstractly and by itself 
would have been indubitably one of moral grandeur, 
would have had in practice presumably the most 
disastrous consequences, in all likelihood bringing 
on the war itself, and so in the end would have 
seemed itself morally objectionable, as the product 
of an exaggerated concern for one's own ethical 

[31] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

spotlessness. Ethical spotlessness is an ideal of the 
cloister, not an ideal of historical reality. In order 
to live and to work we must have the courage to 
take on ourselves our unavoidable share of the moral 
guilt, due to the conflicting demands inevitably made 
upon our frail human nature. 

The deciding difference lies, in my opinion, here : 
that the gradual lapse of a treaty-obligation into 
the background is the slowly maturing result of an 
historic process visible to everybody, and thus an 
occurrence entirely different in its proportions and 
much easier of recognition than an individual's out- 
growing the obligations of his promise. As to a 
treaty there arises in the end a communis opinio 
that it has had its time, in other words, that the 
cessation of its binding force is already known and 
thus no more needs to be made known. ^ An express 
declaration on the part of the state most interested 
comes, therefore, immediately under suspicion of be- 
ing not a simple official notification pour acquit de 
conscience but something quite otherwise — the be- 
ginning of aggression. 

Therefore : Germany was not longer hound by 
the treaty of i8^p, if it can be established that a 
higher moral duty came into conflict with the duty 
of loyalty to her given promise. And further : the 

1 Cf. Valter, loc. cit., p. 62 ; likewise Why We Are at War, 
p. 27. 

[32] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

duty of loyalty to the given promise is to be reckoned 
a greater or a lesser, in the measure that the prom- 
ise deserves to be regarded more or less as altogether 
obsolete, more or less as given under altogether 
different circumstances than those now obtaining. 
(It is here that the rebus sic stantibus plays its real 
part in the whole process of moral judgment.) The 
more obsolete the treaty the readier we will be in- 
clined to say : the breach is defensible. 

But, no matter how obsolete, the treaty is binding, 
unless it yields to a higher moral duty, a morally 
more justifiable striving than the striving for loy- 
alty to the promise. A moral duty, even when no 
longer the greatest, can never yield to purely selfish 
ends, without leading ultimately to moral condem- 
nation. 

The question now becomes this : can such a moral 
duty be shown in Germany's case? My moral con- 
sciousness answers this question with full conviction 
m the affirmative. Germany found herself on the 
2nd of August in the most desperate circumstances 
in which we can conceive a people to be : supported 
only by a weaker ally, that besides had to draw off a 
portion of its forces for use against Servia, she 
stood exposed to a concentric attack by two great 
powers and expected at any moment to be compelled 
to fight England to boot. It was a life and death 
struggle; and though the duty of self-preservation, 
of straining all energies for the safety of self, is 

[33] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

not the highest, we can surely not deny its character 
as a moral duty, a duty toward oneself. I have 
said already the duty of self-preservation is not an 
absolute moral duty, not even for states — there 
are no absolute moral duties — but it is beyond doubt 
a high, a noble duty. In any case it was more than 
pressing enough to set aside the old treaty of 1839. 
And it can hardly be denied that a passage through 
Belgium is, under the circumstances in which Ger- 
many found herself, properly to be judged as the 
demand of self-preservation. I shall not attempt 
to give specific proofs, for I would then be tres- 
passing on the terrain of the military experts. I 
can be content to remind the reader that this is the 
common opinion of all experts. 

I can be the more readily content, since the ques- 
tion whether or not Germany was mistaken in her 
belief is ethically indifferent. Of ethical import 
are never the circumstances, as such, under which 
an action took place, but the circumstances as they 
were conceived by the acting person and as they 
helped to motivate his decision. It is ethically of 
no concern whether his conception was correct or 
incorrect. This can lead to a judgment on his in- 
telligence, not to a judgment on his character. Thus 
even if in the end Germany seems to have deceived 
herself, the only fact of any weight ethically is that 
her decision proceeded from the conviction that the 
passage was imperative for the accomplishment of 

[34] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

the intended action against France. Therefore, 
Germany is not to he condemned morally for the 
fact that, under the circumstances in which she 
found herself, she regarded herself as released from 
the promise delivered to England in i8jp. 

Is her Hne of conduct thereby definitively justified ? 
Far from it. England aside, she had also a duty 
toward Belgium, and this aspect of the matter has 
scarcely been touched upon as yet. Thus at the 
present stage of our investigation we are not ready 
by any means to acquit Germany. However, the 
use made by England of the treaty of i8^p can cer- 
tainly be ethically condemned. In all history was 
ever a nation, struggling under such desperate cir- 
cumstances, subjected to a more arbitrary ethical \ 
demand by another nation — that was besides less 
ethically warranted in its demand by all the con- 
tingencies? Is there a crasser example of the sum- 
mum jus, summa injuria thinkable ? Have we ever 
seen in clearer light to what degree of external 
righteousness legalistic habits of thought, so-called 
"law-abidingness," can mislead men, — until "right"^ 
becomes the very instrument of unrighteousness? 
England's attitude is here ethically identical with 
that of the jury-lawyer, who, with the most un- 
ruffled composure, suddenly cites a forgotten statute 
of the good old times, which seems, — quite acci- 
dentally of course, — to bolster up his case. We 

2 [Recht = "right," also "law" : see above in text, pp. 7-8.] 
[35] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

have here in the crassest form the requirement of 
loyalty to the past : it becomes downright immoral- 
ity, and chiefly because in the end the loyalty touches 
only the outward form of the past, not its spirit — 
for this is long since dead. This leads to the most 
brutal wrong, under the forms of right. 

Perhaps one will ask, why all this discussion? 
Isn't it all too obvious that the whole appeal to the 
treaty of 1839 was nothing but a rather transparent 
pretext on the part of England?^ I answer that 
this does not hinder us from critically examining 
the ethical worth and purport of the appeal, and 
that such is the more necessary where the appeal has 
made such an impression. Moreover, that is but just. 
England has the same right to an impartial exam- 
ination of her case, and, primarily, of her case as 
she herself conceives it. Only through that exam- 
ination can it seem certain whether the appeal to 
the treaty will do or not. And if it will not do, that 
of itself does not prove it a deliberate, conscious 
pretext. The legal habit of thought, in the very 
blood of that people, renders it possible to believe 
in the good faith of citations of law, which, ob- 
jectively considered, are of the most dubious qual- 
ity. It is possible — I don't say I regard it as prob- 
able — that Grey and his associates were genuinely 

3 Professor d'Aulnis de Bourouill pointed out in the Utr. 
Dagb. ["Utrecht Daily Press"] of Oct. 26, 1914, that the war- 
speech of Grey, on Aug. 3, was anterior to the violation of 
Belgium's neutrality, Aug. 4; Ramsay Macdonald also. 

[36] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

indignant in the foreground of their consciousness 
over this devised breach of law. The human con- 
sciousness is such a curiously complicated affair 
that our own real motives may lurk unbeknown in 
the background, when there is present a complex 
that of itself presses to the fore by virtue of our 
accustomed modes of thinking. 

In any case, as to a moral judgment on the legal 
defense conducted by England, we must bear in 
mind the factor described above as one-sided train- 
ing, with the accustomed modes of thinking that 
result therefrom. This element forms a mitigating 
circumstance not to be overlooked.* 

The question of conscious pretext or unconscious 
self-righteousness hovers perpetually before our 
minds on reading those pages where, at the end of 
their indictment of "the new German theory of the 
state" (i. e., von Treitschke's), the authors of Why 
We Are at War, once more sum up their defense 
of "Great Britain's Case" (pp. 115-117). Under all 
the fine words, they still have to recognize that it 
was not alone the menace against Right which 
hastened her call to arms. "It is true that we are 

* In passing, note that in 1870 the high-minded Gladstone 
was far from admitting the absolute binding power of the 
treaty of 1839. On the occasion of the then concluded special 
agreements as to the protection of Belgium's neutrality, he 
said in the House of Commons that he was not of the opinion 
that "the simple fact of the existence of a guarantee is binding 
on every party to it, irrespectively altogether of the particular 
position in which it may find itself at the time when the occa- 
sion for acting on the guarantee arises.'* 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

fighting for our own interest. But what is our 
interest ? We are fighting for Right, because Right 
is our supreme interest. The new German political 
theory enunciates that *our interest is our right.' 
The old — the very old — English political theory is: 
*The Right is our interest.' It is true that we have 
everything to gain by defending the cause of inter- 
national law. Should that prevent us from defend- 
ing that cause?" 

Of a truth, no, — a sober reader will reply, — and 
I wish you joy of the agreeable and convenient (yet 
still more or less accidental) circumstance, that you 
found your own interest formulated in the statutory 
right [recht] ; but, with permission, the question 
really is whether you would also have defended that 
right [recht, law], if it had happened to be of no 
concern to your interest, not to say, directly op- 
posed? The beattis possidens [the happy possessor] 
can talk till doomsday ; but there is perhaps another 
party whose interest just as much requires a new 
construction of that right [recht, law]. Is it forth- 
with so clear that the affair of the first party has 
on its side the moral law, too, as well as the statu- 
tory law ? Or is it not alone the statutory law \het 
positieve recht] that is subject to the universal prin- 
ciple, 

"Alles was entsteht, 
1st wert, dass es zu Grunde geht"? 



[38] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

Is it alone in Germany that Vernunft [sense] 
becomes in the course of time Unsinn [nonsense] ? 

"Our cause, as one would expect from a people 
that has fought out its ozvn internal struggles under 
the forms of law, is a legal cause." The words 
italicized are recommended for careful meditation. 
They might be compared with the words I once 
found somewhere"^ ascribed to Bismarck: ''Wo 
Preussens Macht in Frage kommt, da kenne ich 
kein Rechf ["Where Prussia's power is in ques- 
tion, I know no law"]. If an English prime minis- 
ter, mutatis mutandis, had permitted himself this 
speech of an (above everything else) open-hearted, 
truth-loving giant who ''heraus will mit der Sprache" 
["who blurts it right out"] he would have become 
impossible in his milieu. An Englishman's first 
business is to "save appearances." He fights for 
his interests, but only "under the forms of law." 
That by this very attitude the law itself becomes a 
mere form doesn't bother him, for his attention is 
now concentrated on the form. Any one else who 
not only practically but theoretically is concerned 
more with the content, the real nature of things, will 
see above all "the struggle" and "the interests." 

In the last analysis the fact is this: The English 
position that the mutual existence of states requires 
the absolute, eternal validity of treaties is simply 

5 I can't verify ; but se non e vero, e hen trovato. 
[39] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

wrong. A relative, limited validity is alone practi- 
cable. Reality, in which alone the historic process 
of eternal becoming and evolution has to fulfil itself, 
needs a certain degree of consistency, but no less a 
certain degree of plasticity. Without the last all is at 
a standstill, — that is, dead. The beatus possidens 
desires the standstill: an expanding, an advancing 
individual or race desires movement. 

It is this contrast, which is alv^ays in hiding under 
the superficial debate about right and might. It is 
this eternal strife, which achieved pregnant and 
unforgettable expression in the epoch-making 
[zvereld-historisch] conference at Berlin on August 
4, 1914, between the German Imperial Chancellor 
and the British Ambassador, of which we possess 
an account in the latter's report to his government 
(Why We Are at War, pp. 198-201). It is the 
strife of new Content against old Form; of bleed- 
ing, wrestling Reality against official Phrase ; or, to 
say it roundly, of Truth against conscious or un- 
conscious Falsehood. How little insight and com- 
prehension we have in these matters, is seen from 
the way in which the Vox Popidi, seizing on the 
words "just for a scrap of paper," — words which 
were a perfectly just characterization of the existing 
circumstances as to that particular treaty which 
was alone in question — proceeded to add : "For 



[40] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

Germany all treaties are scraps of paper. The Im- 
perial Chancellor has said so himself."^ 

I fancy that it would be discreet of the Germans 
to keep in check for use only among choicer spirits 
this so likeable and intelligible tendency (recall 
Goethe, and Luther's ''Table-talk") to 'Vigorous 
language" [sterke woorden]. The stupid public 
cannot grasp it; and the might of stupidity is enor- 
mous. Do not the very gods contend in vain against 
it ? Without doubt, we have here one of the causes 
of the general antipathy to the Germans [Duifscher- 
liaat]. Meantime, the problem remains, if a vigor- 
ous forthright, inner life that breaks its way ahead 
in such expressions permits of being kept in check. 
One may be too great to be discreet. 

« But it is a shame that such a great authority in international 
law as Andre Weiss (La violation de la neutralite beige et 
luxemhourgeoise, p. 35) should do likewise. And how little 
the English Ambassador Goschen really sensed the situation, 
appears from the cool words with which he continues his 

story: "After this somewhat painful interview" Indeed it 

was "somewhat" painful, but it was more, infinitely more. 



[41] 



VI. 



THE matter of Germany's treaty-breach toward 
the guarantors is herewith concluded; but 
now comes the more important, because not merely 
formal, but material side of the case, the Belgian 
side. For this side an appeal to the duty of self- 
preservation is ethically inadequate. No people has 
the right to save itself at the expense of another 
people. There is, as Kant has already taught us, 
nothing of absolute value except personality — be it 
that of an individual or that of a people. No per- 
sonality is a priori of more worth than another; 
none has, therefore, the right to use another simply 
as the means for achieving its own ends. This 
moral principle is the foundation of the ruling in 
article 1 of the Hague agreement of 1907 concern- 
ing the rights and obligations of neutral states and 
persons in case of war on land: ''The territory of 
neutral powers is inviolable," with the consequences 
summed up in art. 2-4. 

Germany abrogated this duty also. She can only 
be defended if it can be proven that a still higher 
duty than that of self-preservation came into con- 

[42] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

flict with the duty of respecting the personality of 
another. 

I state the issue intentionally as sharply as pos- 
sible. I disregard whatever mitigating circum- 
stances there be in the affirmed plans of the French 
to pass through or in the affirmed connivance of 
Belgium with England and France; I disregard 
likewise the fact, however undeniable, that Ger- 
many's appearance on the scene is not the only 
cause of the dreadful situation in which poor Bel- 
gium finds herself to-day. In all damage wrought 
by war the will of the attacking army is not the 
only cause; the will of the defenders is a cause no 
less. Moreover, in my opinion, it is hard to deny 
that Belgium's action overstepped the bounds of a 
mere defense of neutrality and thereby the Belgian 
duty, and that especially after the second ultimatum 
it was no longer so much a defense of neutrality, 
as active participation on the side of the Allies. 
Obviously Belgium has the fullest right to take that 
side, but then she can no longer reproach Germany 
for the greater harm thus occasioned. 

Yet all this is but a question of degree, of quan- 
tity. The moral charge remains that Germany did 
attack the personality of another people, — however 
great or little the extent of the attack. For the 
moral judgment, the extent itself is in a way in- 
different: the moral judgment considers primarily 
the quality, not the quantity of actions. 

[43] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

Properly to explain my meaning further, I shall 
have to make a digression on the moral conflict in 
general and on a most important case of that con- 
flict in particular. 

The moral conflict. In all that I have thus far 
read on the violation of Belgian neutrality, I have 
missed any explicit indication that the case belongs 
to this well-known ethical category. Recognition of 
this fact alone naturally makes a condemnation 
sans phrase impossible. That its recognition seems 
diflicult here is not to be wondered at. One side of 
the dilemma, becoming the reality, so preoccupies our 
attention through the gigantic miseries of its effects, 
that the other side of the dilemma, and thereby even 
the existence of any dilemma at all, is obscured — 
a situation naturally much assisted by the now almost 
universal partisanship of passion. 

One often comes across the notion that the moral 
conflict really has no existence, and that an ad- 
mission of the same is a sign of a flabby morality that 
wants to excuse everything. 'Tear to obey the ideal 
is considered a lack of moral insight or of moral 
courage and hence wrong. "^ The video meliora 
prohoque, deteriora seqiwr is then conceived to be 
simply a frivolous saying. The truth is that it is 
a tragic lament over the actual situation in which 



1 Dr. H. T. de Graaf, Moeilijkheden in het zedelijke leven, 
Groningen, 1904, 



[44] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

every individual who is both ethical and acting is 
placed in this world. 

It is also noticeable that the conflict-of-duties 
does not occupy the high place in ethical literature 
that belongs to its preeminent and fundamental sig- 
nificance. The writer, who in the more recent litera- 
ture has taken that significance into account — Georg 
Simmel" — expressly points out this phenomenon 
(loc. cit., p. 423). The conflict is apparently very 
often unconscious. This can conceivably happen in 
several ways, which are presumably reducible to 
two main groups: lack of moral insight, above all 
of breadth of insight, of essentially deep, many- 
sided moral earnestness, owing to the relatively 
low moral level of the acting individual ; and, next, 
complete concentration of the whole individual upon 
one idea and end, so that in each conflict one of the 
possible paths is chosen unhesitatingly as a matter 
of course. This is the significance of the great 
saying of Goethe: ''Der Handelnde ist immer ge- 
wissenlos." In this connection let me recall a 
notable passage in the ''Conversations with Ecker- 
mann.'' On May 29, 1831, the devoted famulus 
records : "Goethe was telling me of a lad who was 
quite inconsolable over some small fault he'd com- 
mitted. 'I didn't exactly like to see this,' he said; 



2 Einleitung hi die Moralwissenschaft, 1893, II, pp. 307-426, 
especially, 380-426. The quintessence is in his masterly little 
book, Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophies pp. 151-158. 

[45] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

'for it indicates an all too tender conscience, that 
puts so high a value on one's own moral self that 
it won't forgive that self in anything. Such a con- 
science makes men hypochondriacs if it isn't counter- 
balanced by great practical activity.' " It is, just 
because of the apparently high moral level upon 
which this lad stood, more than likely — though not 
exactly stated — that his small fault was committed 
only amid the moral conflict. Goethe gives here the 
only prescription, I take it, whereby noble-minded 
men can escape perpetual qualms of conscience: to 
possess at the same time great practical activity. 
One may see the reverse in Amiel's Journal Intime, 
and in the monologue of that other sufferer from 
conscience, Hamlet : 

"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, 
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, 
And enterprises of great pith and moment 
With this regard their currents turn awry 
And lose the name of action!" 

Amid this great activity there are naturally con- 
flicts too, but they do not come into consciousness, or 
at least not so strongly. The strong, active man en- 
joys the contrary of ''the too tender conscience" and 
"the pale cast of thought" ; his "native hue of resolu- 
tion," in other words, his "robust conscience," is, how- 
ever, truly /o^o^^n^r^ different from absence of con- 
science, making instinctively, almost unconsciously, 
the right choice in every conflict that comes up. 

[46] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

There is still another type that reaches its goal 
without trouble in all conflicts, but at all times in 
exactly the inverted direction, since its whole life 
is guided not by rational ends but by delusion, be it 
a beautiful delusion, a noble fiction: that is Don 
Quixote, with his innumerable descendants. Its dis- 
tinguishing peculiarity is that in ethical conflicts it 
invariably makes the inverted choice, — not because 
the character, but because the insight is inverted. 

A third cause of the conflict's remaining uncon- 
scious, or rather of its actual non-appearance sub- 
jectively even where objectively possible or inevi- 
table, is the tendency to a one-sided fixation of 
attention, whereby always but one side of the pend- 
ing affair comes into consciousness. This factor is 
perhaps ethically indifferent, that is, stands in no 
relation to the character. 

Now, whereas in man's actions so many conflicts 
either do not exist even subconsciously, or do not 
penetrate into consciousness, it is no wonder that in 
man's moral judgments this element very often does 
not play the important role that it should. Herein 
lies, I believe, one of the chief reasons why moral 
judgments often turn out so cruelly unfair and so 
miserably stupid; herein, too, the reason for one 
of the most dreadful situations in which a noble 
human being can find himself: to be morally con- 
demned, with relative justice, by somebody who 
intellectually and morally is not fit to unlace his 

[47] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

shoes, and to be compelled merely to abide in that 
situation, since it is precisely the lower moral level 
that renders it impossible for the other to see the 
exceedingly relative justice and the much greater 
injustice of his judgment. In such a case there is 
but one possibility : to endure ' in silence, and to 
meditate : *They know not what they do' ; or, re- 
calling another sublime example, to say in all earn- 
estness, as Huss at the stake said to the old woman 
tottering up with her faggots, "sancta simplicitas'^ 
— in other words, inwardly to recognize to the full 
the relative justice of the judger which seems to 
him the absolute justice, and to experience joy in 
the very earnestness which in each case expresses 
itself through the judgment passed. 

But let us now consider the moral conflict a little 
more narrowly. This conflict arises, not alone be- 
cause our single and indivisible personality stands 
in divers relations to other individuals and to other 
spheres — from which circumstance duties first arise 
— but, over and above this, because the interests of 
the persons and the spheres are dependent upon each 
other, and can on this account make upon one indi- 
vidual mutually contending demands. The individ- 
ual stands ''at the intersection of many spheres, 
social, ideal, or in general in some way advan- 
tageous'* {Hmiptprohleme der Philosophic, p. 153). 
Thus it comes that there exist duties also tozvard 

[48] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

oneself. Now, one aspect can enter into another 
and perpetually does enter into another. And it is 
not to be expected that there will be any reconcile- 
ment in the future, since the more complex and close 
the structure of society, the more numerous become 
on the one hand the relations in which the individual 
is involved, the spheres of interest in which he has 
part, while, on the other hand, the self -conscious- 
ness, the force whereby the personality strives to 
control and regulate the content of consciousness, 
becomes continually more and more intensive. 

The conflict manifests itself mainly in two chief 
forms which Simmel calls the logical (contradic- 
toire) and the material (contraire) . By the former, 
he means a case where one and the same action can 
be demanded by one duty and forbidden by another ; 
by the latter, the situation where either of two 
duties, though not contradictory in purpose and 
content, yet takes for its accomplishment all one^s 
available time, energies, and means. The second 
form is naturally the milder, and is the more likely 
to result in a compromise; the first is the sharper, 
and the decision usually demands that one of the 
two duties gives way altogether. Both forms, how- 
ever, may often intermingle or intercross (pp. 384- 
385). 

Moreover, of highest importance for the whole 
matter seems to me the indisputable fact that the 
duty which has been of necessity repudiated never- 

[49] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

theless still maintains its moral effect, still remains 
pressing upon the conscience. It is, as if the moral 
ideal intended to begrudge us the benefit of the ultra 
posse nemo tenetur. Precisely through this element 
does the conflict of duties become a tragic conflict, 
yes, the very groundwork of all tragedy. The tragic 
hero is the noble and strong one who falls into a 
tremendous ethical conflict between whose irrecon- 
cilable demands he is crushed to death. In this process 
an important accompanying role is fulfilled by the 
ethical reaction of his milieu, which, being still under 
the influence of the repudiated duty, feels it must 
punish him for his offense. 

It is on account of its significance not alone for 
the acting party, but precisely on account of its par- 
ticular significance for the party judging, that I make 
mention here of this tragic side of the ethical con- 
flict. Just as little, namely, as the action performed 
in conflict can ever entirely satisfy the party acting, 
can the judgment passed on that action ever entirely 
satisfy the party judging. There always remains 
a "yes but " 

In the case pending, for example: Assume that 
Germany is blameless; still our consciousness con- 
tinues every instant unreconciled to the fate of Bel- 
gium. We must be on our guard lest this unrecon- 
cilement dominate our entire judgment. 

I should like to add here another word or two 
on the cause of this phenomenon of un-satisfaction. 

[SO] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

Simmel sees in it an argument against what he calls 
"The monism of morality," i. e., the conception 
that all moral precepts are reducible to one funda- 
mental principle. This unsatis faction proves, he 
thinks, that there are several principles, ultimately 
different, or at least for the moment incapable of 
being reduced to a unity; though it is to be as little 
denied that we are, on the other hand, compelled 
just as much by our whole make-up to demand such 
a unity in the realm of ideals. I believe, in all 
modesty, the cause lies rather in this, that with 
every decision there persists in us a greater or a 
lesser remainder of uncertainty as to its justifiability 
— the more dubious the case, the stronger are the 
claims of the repudiated duty — and that this un- 
certainty, on its part, lies in the fact that so many 
times we live and move and have our being in com- 
plete ignorance as to the objective worth of the con- 
tending duties. I consider the greatest defect in 
Heymans's Einfiihrung in die Ethik is that his purely 
formalistic formulation of a basic ethical principle, 
"wolle objective'' (this amounts in the main to about 
what Kant also intended) , is in reality only applicable 
as a formulation of the nature of moral intention.^ 
For a complete ethics, however, there would be 

3 1 believe, salva reverentia, that Professor Heymans {loc. 
cit., p. 26) is nodding, when he contrasts his formal monism 
with Simmel's pluralism. Simmel means at bottom only the 
pluralism of ultimate values, and does not deny, as far as I 
can see, the possibility of a monistic formulation of the nature 
of moral intention [gezindheid], 

[51] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

necessary a treatment of how moral intention 
changes into moral deeds, in other words, a treatment 
of by far the deepest and weightiest problem which 
is encountered by our blindly groping and bloodily 
wrestling humanity : how the moral ideal gets itself 
realized, not only in the actions of an individual but 
in the historic process of humanity. Along with this 
we meet at once the question concerning the value 
of the different aims which one can set oneself, 
and this, too, not the value for me or for my neigh- 
bor or for anybody else, but the value in itself, the 
objective value, — about which in an instant the 
portentous question rises, what as a matter of fact 
are we to understand by the value in itself, by 
the value which is thus sundered from human evalu- 
ation and from evaluating human beings? Some- 
where hereabouts is the point where our human 
thinking reaches its limit, and the counsel of silence 
is good, and it is only the unmediated life-force 
of the moral urge that carries us onward.* 

What does it avail me that I possess to the full 

^ Compare in the "Ode to Pan" of Keat's Endymion : 
"Be thou the unimaginable lodge 
For solitary thinkings, such as dodge 
Conception to the very bourne of heaven, 
Then leave the naked brain ; be still the leaven 
That, spreading in this dull and clodded earth, 
Gives it a touch ethereal, a new birth. 
Be still a symbol of immensity, 
A firmament reflected in a sea, 
An element filling the space between, 
An Unknown. ..." 

[52] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

the objective attitude \_zakelijke gedndheid], of 
which Stump f has so finely said that it is the moral 
attitude [zedelijke], and that I, as far as frail man 
is able, ''mir selber sum Ohjekt geworden bin/' 
if, in my desire to evaluate objectively the various 
possible ends as conceived, I discover over and over 
again that / lack a fixed value-meter, an invariable 
standard"^ Does not there lie here a still greater 
difficulty than that which lies in the superhuman 
task of true objectivity? I believe that it is the 
difficulty. Were our evaluating function as clear 
and transparent, as relatively simple, as our logical 
thinking, then there would be nothing necessary for 
virtue but moral intention {gezindheid'], practical 
objectivity. But it is otherwise, and that makes our 
moral life so difficult and so dim. That is the 
ultimate cause why men forever with one another 
wage war and must wage war. We have not the 
moral ideal before us, like a bright lode-star, which 
points us indubitably the just course; it is alone in 
us, darkling and vague, as '^dunkler Drang/' and it 
gives us its revelation about the value of things, 
not according to a system of rules, but after its 
own peculiar, indescribable fashion. It is on this 
account also that axiology, although practically the 
most important of all the philosophic sciences, is 
scarcely yet born. 

The moral process within us, the origin not only 
of moral intention but of moral wisdom, the knowl- 

[53] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

edge of values which alone puts us in a position for 
moral action, has been as yet very incompletely dis- 
covered by science, and is indeed even for science 
inaccessible in its fundamental nature. We can only 
say here : ''individuum ineffabilef We are here in 
the midst of the mysteries of personality, where 
only direct perception, not logic, is possible. 

But it is to be at once emphasized that the moral 
judgment looks above all to the degree of moral 
intention. Of no one can there be required greater 
moral wisdom than Life has given him and could 
give. We define and we appraise, but do not con- 
demn. (Thus an Ethics which seeks to be in the 
first instance a psychology of the moral judgment 
does entirely right to confine itself to the moral in- 
tention. The moral judgment, however, is not the 
whole of the field of morals, and not even the most 
important part.) But the individual moral life is 
not satisfied with this. It experiences in one way 
or another unsatisfaction, unrest as to the achieved 
degree of insight into values, and feels an impulsion 
to a higher. In reality, it can be required of every 
one — for it lies in one^s character — that he inces- 
santly strive with all his heart to increase and deepen 
his ethical wisdom. Only under this condition can 
there be complete reconciliation with one's mistakes 
of an earlier stage. Only 

'*Wer immer strebend sich bemiiht" 
is in the end rescued from the Evil One. 

[54] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

And here three other points must be noted. First, 
the ethical conflict has usually this peculiarity, that 
one side of the dilemma speaks more to the heart 
and the emotions, whilst the other is of more ob- 
jective nature. Simmel {loc. cit., p. 391) well and 
justly points out that in the drama, from the very 
nature of the case, it is commonly the emotional 
side which is stressed, and that, moreover, there is 
not the least guarantee for the ethical correctness of 
the judgment. The "feeling" {''gevoeV'] is the 
unconscious after-effect of earlier intellectual reflec- 
tions and convictions (p. 393). This indicates that 
the conflicts frequently contain an historical element : 
of the clashing duties one is the older and belongs to 
an older stage of civilization [cultuurstadium] than 
the other which as yet establishes its claim only 
through the reason, and only with the passage of 
time can "enter into the category of what pertains 
to the feelings." It is obvious that, under the cir- 
cumstances, nothing can be settled as to the worth 
of either of the conflicting duties, merely by virtue of 
its more emotional or its more intellectual character. 
It is quite as possible that the older duty belongs to 
the immutable ethical prudence of life, — to that 
permanent store of racial experience already ren- 
dered respected and trustworthy by age, — as that 
it is outworn by the historic process, and merely by 
virtue of that jealous obstinacy (with which life 
everywhere clings to once accepted forms) still 

[55] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

maintains in our subconsciousness a life no longer 
at one with present-day reality. Every present is 
formed, as it were, of different historical layers ; the 
past is never altogether dead. We can ''enter upon 
our inheritance from Mankind, with no discounting 
of its inner contradictions, as if sub beneficio inven- 
tarir (p. 392) and so even the past gives us op- 
posing elements, which are then augmented by those 
which our own thinking creates out of the present. 

The contrast between ethical conservatism and 
ethical new light [nieuwlichterij] is, according to 
Simmel, closely connected with that between a pre- 
dominantly emotional and a predominantly intel- 
lectual life. And inasmuch as feeling corresponds 
more to the average niveau of society, the contrast 
is here at the same time that between prevailing 
custom and individual moral thinking. 

But before going further, I ought to remark that 
it doesn't seem to me altogether right to connect the 
historical element in the moral conflict — which is 
here my chief concern — with the contrast, feeling 
vs. understanding. The transition from an older 
morality — deeply interwoven with the personality 
and hence practically unconscious in its workings — 
to another, a newer, seems to me to be a process that 
is much more and that goes much deeper than the 
reflective operations of the understanding. This 
individual understanding, with the haphazardness of 
its available data and its exposure to the passions 

[56] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

which demand protection, is I fancy not always to be 
impHcitly trusted in moralibus [in matters of mor- 
als]. As against rationalistic radicalism, conserva- 
tism is doubtless in all points pretty nearly in the 
right. How is the understanding alone to become 
aware of new values? That is the question. Here 
there turns up again the secret process of how values 
become known, already mentioned above. The in- 
ner creation of new moral insights is more than 
a process of the understanding, — though by this it 
is not affirmed that the reason stands outside of it; 
and just as little that the new insight, when once 
born, shall not frequently require for a time, while 
still young and often uncertain and undeveloped, the 
help of reason in the strife with others.^ If, on the 
contrary, we see another acting according to a moral 
insight which is as yet unfamiliar to us, then the 
older idea, usually persisting unbeknown, reacts 
within us emotionally. 

^I am sure that Simmel (p. 401), in making Goethe's 
"dunkler Drang" [dim urge] equivalent to what he describes as 
the emotional factor in the moral process, overlooks the real 
meaning. The emotional factor, no less, can cause us to 
"irren." Goethe means the secret working within us of the 
moral and spiritual ground of reality, which can bring to birth 
in ourselves new moral insights: 

"Der gute Mensch, in seinem dunklen Drange, 
1st sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst." 

The moral feeling must be present; and then the "dunkler 
Drang" does the rest. But it does it in its own time and in 
its own way, which are seldom our time and our way. 



[57] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

In the second place. There is one method of 
withdrawing from the tragedy of the inevitable 
ethical conflict : by not acting at all, that is, by func- 
tioning not creatively, organically, from within, but 
mechanically, passively, from without. For such a 
life there is opportunity in the cloister; but not only 
there. Obedience, perinde ac cadaver, excludes all 
conflict, for it knows absolutely but one duty. Yet 
such a practice is of itself immoral in the end, for 
life is nothing else than an out-streaming from 
within; and to mechanize oneself, to make oneself 
small and still, is practically the same as spiritual 
suicide. If one revolts at this, then the moral con- 
flict and manful decision is the only course. I can- 
not now enter further into the far-reaching conse- 
quences which this undeniable fact has for the 
whole philosophy of life; but I can't refrain from 
making room for two citations from von Treitsch- 
ke's Politik. On page 99 : "This is indeed the hard 
and the deep thing in human life — this, that, in the 
multitude of obligations overwhelming every human 
being by virtue of his membership in different social 
groups, he cannot get off without collisions among 
these duties. In passing judgment, the point is ulti- 
mately always whether the individual understood his 
own innermost nature and developed it to the high- 
est perfection of which he was capable." And on 
page 132: "There can be no life in the world of 
history without tragic guilt." 

[58] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

In the third place : the moral wrong that is com- 
mitted in the conflict remains a wrong not only for 
the consciousness of the doer but for the conscious- 
ness of him who becomes the sacrifice and who, as 
such, is not particularly prone to see and to acknowl- 
edge the conflict. On his side possible reprisals are 
to be expected, which necessarily call for preventive 
measures on the side of the original actor, if the 
now elected higher goal is not to be endangered. 
Thus matters can easily go from bad to worse, 
and yet the original act remains morally defensible. 
In this respect the whole case can become so in- 
finitely complicated as to quite transcend our ken. 
These are the secondary entanglements which gen- 
erally bring the tragic hero to his ruin. 

"Alle Schuld racht sich auf Erden"— 

tragic guilt, no less. 

Yet what is here of chief importance for the 
moral judgment is this very complicatedness. In 
many a case the conscientious judger will not have 
the courage to come to a conclusion. Above all, this 
must be borne in mind: it is never an action, but 
always the whole character that is judged. If the 
underbrush of complications is too thick for us to 
arrive at a judgment, let our judgment not speak. 
And let us at all times leave room for the possibility 
of a mistake made in good faith. "Our portion of 
goodness lies not in our achieving the right, but in 

[59] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

our earnest and upright will to achieve it. If never- 
theless we err and realize we err, we will regret our 
error; but our conscience exonerates us. The most 
that can be demanded of human beings is full con- 
scientiousness." (Lipps, loc. cit., p. 217.) 



[60] 



VII. 



AND now for the promised discussion of the spe- 
cial ethical conflict that outweighs all others 
in its importance. It belongs to the psychology of 
genius. 

We frequently find in those sciences which operate 
with psychological concepts, without being de- 
signedly psychology, the opinion that all human ac- 
tions are either egoistic or altruistic. Schopenhauer, 
for instance, was also of this opinion. It is mistaken. 
As a matter of fact, we desire all sorts of things, 
strive for the realization of all sorts of objects, 
which are of use neither for ourselves nor for 
others, at least not desired on that account. "These 
contents of our will hover before us in objectivity, 
as something that shall be, in and for itself, inde- 
pendent of the pleasurable or painful, egoistic or 
altruistic, feeling-reflexes that may attach them- 
selves thereto."^ Science, art, politics, religion create 

1 Simmel, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, p. 155. Cf. Einlei- 
tung in die Moralwissenschaft, II, p. 397: "Objective ends, 
whose realization permits of being felt as an inner, but in sorne 
degree impersonal necessity, as the task which comes to us in 
the world-plan." 

[61] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

such values-in-themselves. They are, in the final 
analysis, willed for but one reason, and for but one 
reason created, often at the cost of the greatest 
sacrifices : because a world wherein they become 
realized appeals to us as worthier than the world 
at hand. With the recognition of this scarcely de- 
niable fact, we raise ourselves above the contrast of 
optimism and pessimism. The world is then no 
longer a factum to be reacted upon, but a task upon 
which we must labor, while the inner urge to this 
labor relegates to the background the question of 
how it affects us personally. 

We are, therefore, beings who from within out- 
ward, impelled in strange wise, create objective 
values in the visible world. Life is an everlasting 
process of forming and re-forming." But not all 
of us are equally loyal and equally gifted toilers on 
that work. Genuine morality is always a creating — 
or a becoming created — from within outward, but 
with how few of us is that divine miracle completed. 

Every one who concentrates with zeal and per- 
severance his entire power upon some end conceived 
by himself works creatively; yet with how few of 
us does this function come to anything beyond the 
writing of a letter or the devising of some every- 
day scheme. Those of us with whom it does come 
to more, those who, by virtue of their peculiarly 

2 Read Dr. A. H. de Hartog, "De Beteekenis van den Vorm 
in het Wereldgeheel," Nieuwe Gids, July, 1914. 

[62] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

fortunate endowment are possessed of the gift to 
give birth to original combinations of ideas, who 
prove themselves capable of bringing forth new, 
objectively valuable creations, these favored ones we 
call geniuses. One of the most universal character- 
istics of their psychical structure is the entire, ex- 
clusive, self-sacrificing concentration upon the one 
purpose which is the deepest expression of their 
nature. That purpose they must realize or perish — 
*'sterben oder triumphieren.'" 

In this they think neither of themselves nor of 
others, but only of their cause. But, since their 
cause is objectively of worth, they are the kings of 
mankind, at the same time the servants of all. Their 
existence is more momentous for all men than the 
existence of friend Tom, or Dick, or Harry [Jan, 
Piet of Klaas]. 

I may add that he alone essentially deserves the 
name of genius whose achievements are objectively 
of worth. The fact that one is stronger, Cleverer, 
slier, than all others put together is not enough to 
make him a genius. For the eminently moral factor 
is lacking. There is no such thing as a genius-of- 
the-stock-exchange or a genius-at-deception [een 
geniaal speadant of een geniaal bedrieger], for the 
world gets thereby no greater worth when a worth- 
less individual comes at last to sit throned on a 
huge heap of gold; just as little as it were of 
supreme significance should a morally worthless 

[63] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

people establish a world-empire. Each worker can 
only become a genius when he works, not for him- 
self, but for the worth of the world. 

Now just as surely as morality is the realization 
of objectively worthy ends, so surely has every true 
genius one all-surpassing duty: the realization of 
the end that to him appears above all others objec- 
tively of worth. His quality of genius [djn geniali- 
teit] lies precisely herein, that this end iSj for a fact, 
of worth. 

Therefore, such an individual lives in a continual 
ethical conflict : with all duties that make their claims 
upon him, the primary question will always be: 
Does my spiritual vocation [roeping] become thereby 
imperiled or not? For the sake of this vocation 
[this mission, calling], he may and he must permit 
himself things that for every other man would be 
indefensible. This is the deep sense of the words : 
*^quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.'' Jupiter has 
more rights than the ox, precisely because he has 
one weighty, all-surpassing duty : to be Jupiter, the 
Creator. Only one who really understands nothing 
of all this can suppose that duty is easy. Only one 
who has never reflected on the desperate quarrel of 
Spirit versus Nature, on the heavy task of "Ought" 
in translating itself into "Being," and then in sub- 
jecting itself to "Being," — in a word, only one who 
has never reflected on the chances of the Logos, the 
Moral-reason, in getting itself realized in the actual 

[64] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

world can fancy that duty can run its course without 
conflicts. 

Here is thus one duty higher than that of self- 
preservation : the duty of vigilance for the realiza- 
tion of the vocation of one's own genius.^ This is 
higher than that of self-preservation, because the 
realized vocation serves, at least ideally, the good 
of all. 

Now the State, as we have already seen, has (just 
as has every one, even the least of us) a particular 
calling: the ethical. It is called to the realizing of the 
ethical ideal (just as are we) in its own being, that 
is, in the people of whom it is a phase [verschijnings- 
wij^e], and in that part of the world where the 
authority of that people obtains. It creates, there- 
fore, among other things, law, — as the condition 
for the undisturbed development of a higher free 
morality. 

Yet, quite as little as individuals, do states stand 
all on the same level. There are strong states and 
weak, enterprising and sluggish, wise and foolish, 
intellectual and stupid. There is also a difference 
in the ethical level. There are high-moral states 
and there are immoral states. 

There is finally a state with the quality of genius 

3 The contrast, made by Lipps, between individual and per- 
sonality gets here a deeper significance. The individual of 
genius sacrifices both himself and something much more, in 
the realization of his personality. Much of importance in H. 
Tijrck, Der geniale Mensch. 

[65] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

[een stafen-genialiteit]. As the vocation of a state 
can only exist as a moral vocation, this quality of 
genius must be moral genius. 

We saw that all true and free morality has by 
nature something of genius. Moral genius is thus 
a sort of genius to the second power. It consists 
not in the fact that one achieves a very high degree 
of morality, a strong moral feeling, but in the fact 
that one renews morality, that one achieves a higher 
morality, in a word, that one becomes, by the ''inner 
illumination" of his independent selfhood, aware 
of new values, of values heretofore unperceived. Is 
not this, indeed, the common characteristic of the 
few who are recognized in history as moral geniuses, 
as creators in the moral realm? 

This is the highest stage to which a human being 
can mount : the stage of ethical genius. 

Thus far absolutely but one State as such has 
manifested ethical genius : the Roman state, to which 
we owe in part our civil law. Or will one affirm 
that England too has had her age of genius, during 
which she created her national law? I deny this 
emphatically : the falsehood and the weakness of the 
parliamentary principle* as a means of realizing 
right and law have become clearer than day ; and it 

* [By "the parliamentary principle" Labberton does not mean 
the universal franchise and representative government, zvith 
legislative, executive and judicial diirision of function. Compare 
below.] 

[66] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

is precisely the glory of Prussia that she has striven 
for a different principle. 

The people of Eckhart, Tauler and Luther, the 
people of Kant, Schiller and Fichte, of Bach, Beet- 
hoven and Brahms, the people who, personified in 
that unfathomable marvel which dwelt in humble 
Weimar as His Excellency Privy Councillor J. W. 
von Goethe, mapped out its program for generations 
ahead, that people, as I firmly believe, now that it 
has in the last forty-four years finally achieved like- 
wise its political unity, will form a state which in the 
end, in so far as it has opportunity, in so far as the 
natural foundation for this spiritual product is given, 
will manifest equally an ethical genius. It is my 
inner conviction that Prussia is the ethically sound 
kernel of Europe, from which in the end is to spring 
the ethical regeneration of our desperately ailing 
world. 

This is actually nothing more than a belief, an 
intuition, an instinctive conviction, of no argumen- 
tative force for others. I admit this gladly and 
fully, although, in my opinion, the Prussian national 
law [Staatsrecht'] can properly be adduced as the 
beginning of the argument.^ Indeed, there lurks 
an indisputable symptom of genius in the fact that 

^[Cf. John W. Burgess (formerly Professor of Constitutional 
and International Law in Columbia University), The European 
War of 1914, pp. 93-105, for a succinct presentation of modern 
Germany's achievements in various fields of organized human 
endeavor.] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

one is ill-adapted to the current notions of the day, 
i. e., that one has one's own standards and ideals. 
Of all European countries Prussia is the farthest 
removed from Rousseau's atomism and the dema- 
goguery of the half plus one. And all Germany 
has already the strongest organisations in the inter- 
ests of the trades and professions, which will form 
the foundation for the positive politics and for the 
law-making of the future, as the parliamentary prin- 
ciple falls more and more into general disrepute.® 

^ Cf. A. Christensen, Politik und Massenmoral, pp. 180-197. 



[68] 



VIII. 



BUT for the proposition that the German people 
in any case stands upon an altogether unusual 
moral level, one or two other points may be noted 
which must at least arrest the attention even of the 
doubting ones. 

In the first place, there is the fact that this people 
came to its mature activity so late in the world's 
history. This people is a people of a profoundly 
deep inner life; it is by nature not active, but essen- 
tially contemplative. Its very habit of dwelling so 
much in the content of life renders its form-giving 
ability relatively so small. It had endured till 1871 
before it gave form to its external politics; all its 
best art is art of content, not of form. Faust, a 
fundamental work on ethics, is formally a poem 
often of rather dubious craftsmanship, here and 
there below the mark. German scholars are no- 
torious for the form of their works. Such a one 
as Bergson, a philosopher with the style of an 
artist — and the two, as it were, unfused, so that a 
peculiar, intentional, coquettish solicitude for the 
form becomes perceptible — would be unthinkable 

[69] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

in Germany; and he is in disrepute among many 
precisely because of his external elegance. One does 
not trust such prettiness. When a German is a 
''fine" writer — as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche — 
it is nothing else than the internal necessity to ex- 
press oneself so and not otherwise. 

"Such' Er den redlichen Gewinn, 
Sei Er kein schellenlauter Thor, 
Es tragt Verstand und rechter Sinn 
Mit wenig Kunst sich selber vor; 
Und wenn's euch Ernst ist, was zu sagen, 
Ist's notig, Wort en nachzujagen?" 

The endowment of this people is not primarily 
esthetic, but ethical/ 

Whenever a people so devoted to the inner life, 
a people of "Dichter und Denker'' ["poets and think- 
ers"], becomes in a large way practically active, 
it becomes so not by nature, not from egoistic mo- 
tives, but because it has encountered within itself 
an unavoidable Duty, because it is driven on and 
spurred on by the Spirit [den Geest], because it 
has become aware of a mission [vocation] with 
respect to the world. We are wont to be amazed 
and indignant over the change and to compare the 
present Germany unfavorably with the earlier. The 

1 In the same connection may be noted much smaller matters : 
The German hasn't as good manners as the Englishman; he 
has less grace than the Frenchman; he is often badly dressed, 
etc., etc. Just these things are wont to determine the judgment 
on Jan Alleman. And then too he isn't ashamed of them 
either ! 

[70] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

situation seems to me quite the reverse r the earlier, 
which is absolutely not dead, furnishes precisely the 
guarantee that in the present Germany it is not 
egotism but the Spirit that lives and works. 

The activity of a naturally contemplative being 
is always something essentially peculiar and su- 
premely worthy: it occurs only under strong inner 
stress, and takes its rise from the deepest and 
clearest wellsprings of life, — there where ultimately 
both activity and contemplation have their common 
dwelling and their common birth-place. 

In all that we can say of Germany, there is 
virtually always involved the wholly unique phe- 
nomenon of this deep inner life. I have already 
referred to the great openheartedness and honesty 
and tendenc}^ to vigorous language. No bon gout, 
the Frenchman would say: an insult to the form. 
Entirely true, but an unmistakable symptom of the 
strong living content, which now and then, precisely 
in its idea of being more than form, intentionally 
breaks through the form, from necessity, — or from 
playfulness (as often with Goethe) to plague the 
Philistines. The French ^'epater le bourgeois^' oc- 
curs rather by means of just these formal factors. 
(We might argue with some propriety that the con- 



2 [Cf. the thoughtful, clear, and restrained presentation of 
this idea in the article "The True Germany," by Kuno Francke, 
Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 1915.] 



[71] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

trast France-Germany is really that of love-of-form 
and content-of-life, estheticism and morality.)^ 

In close connection with the foregoing is the 
German's incapacity to make himself beloved or 
even intelligible among strangers. One who lives 
inwardly cannot be understood from without, but 
only from within one's own innermost life, by vir- 
tue of ''sympathetic insight" [a German word, Ein- 
filhlimg, *'a feeling into"]. His outward manifesta- 
tions often seem queer and strange, and arouse dis- 
like and mistrust. At the same time, he is com- 
pelled by the very depth and warmth of his tem- 
perament to seek sympathy and companionship : and 
then we find him intrusive. If he feels the impossi- 
bility of this and withdraws pained into himself, 
then we call him sullen and unsocial. If you hap- 
pen to have had dealings with him when his state of 
mind was betwixt and between, then it's easy to 
say: "The German is sweet as a pussy cat, when 
he needs you; but when he doesn't need you any 
longer, then you get a kick to boot." 

The currency of such opinions should not, how- 
ever, unduly impress us, for we know that the 

3 After this was written, I saw that Rudolph Eucken had 
already so argued in the Internationale Monatsschrift fiir Wis- 
senschaft, Kunst und Technik, January 15, 1915 [?]. We might 
add that, whereas the French love of form is of a more 
esthetic and hence fairly harmless sort, England is an example 
of a national tendency to the worship of ethical form — some- 
thing much more dangerous. 

[721 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

crowd is unthinking and lives by imitation. It has 
become a fashion, I should almost say "good fun," 
to call the Germans names. It is ''ton"; and Tom 
chatters, and Dick must chatter after. In a small 
way we have the same phenomenon in what may be 
considered closed groups, as a student fraternity, 
when suddenly, no one knows how, one word or 
another, one turn of expression or another, becomes 
all the go. Then everywhere, in season and out of 
season, they are dragged in and forever applauded 
with unwearied zest. For, to be sure, ''it's the 
latest." There is something of this sort in this 
calling ''the Muffs" [''de Moffen"'] names— only 
that is now no longer exactly "the latest." It is 
simply a symptom of the insipidity of the multitude. 

The Germans — as they say further — have no re- 
spect for another's personality, no conception of 
another's human worth. They work always with 
force, with the corporal's stick. The English know 
better, and so they are the good colonizers, while the 
Germans have not been able to pacify even such a 
territory as Schleswig-Holstein, to say nothing of 
Poland and Alsace-Lorraine. 

Here, too, the reproach, I believe, turns finally 
against him who utters it. It is very easy to leave 
another's personality alone, if one on the whole is 



* ["MofFenland" is Dutch slang for Germany. Moffen has 
about the same connotations as "Dagos" in America — it is not 
exactly abusive.] 

[73] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

not bothering much about personaHty and inner 
personal life. The English method of colonization 
is directed toward a practical, outward organization, 
a nice operation of the political and economic ma- 
chine, toward "Civilization" in a word; and it can 
achieve that purpose so well, just because it takes 
no thought for the essential inner refining process, 
— that ''Ktilhtr," which would make some meddling 
with personality unavoidable. It is not so very 
hard by such means to keep affairs peaceable. 

The German has been taught by Kant that per- 
sonality is the only absolute value in the world. He 
has read in his Goethe: 

"Volk und Knecht und Ueberwinder 
Sie gestehn zu jeder Zeit: 
Hochstes Gliick der Erdenkinder 
Sei nur die Personlichkeit." 

He is thus not satisfied with governing and ex- 
ploiting; he strives to educate. Let us admit he 
often makes two mistakes : first, he strives to edu- 
cate too much according to his own image; and, 
second, he sometimes overestimates man's capacity 
for education. Then conflicts arise, and then the 
miserable "Muff" [de leelijke Mof] has gone and 
done it again. Yet the German labors uninter- 
ruptedly, with impressive earnestness and zeal, upon 
his own improvement. Nothing is further from his 
thought than the slogan : "right or wrong, my coun- 
try." Thus it is to be expected that, with greater 

[74] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

experience in this field, still so new to him, he will 
learn: first, 

"Eines schickt sich nicht fiir Alle"; 

and, second, one does not indeed gather grapes and 
figs from thistles and thorns, and thus with many 
a specimen of Homo Sapiens can do nothing more 
sane than to let him be what he is, after having 
bound him energetically to the law of the land. 
That will be most comfortable for the party con- 
cerned, and there will be a good sight less footless 
jobbery in this world, that needs so much real recon- 
structing besides. And, finally, with the truly edu- 
catable specimens, the business will be to learn to 
avoid the mistake of those educators who stand too 
high above their fosterlings — the mistake of de- 
manding too much. The great question is always 
how the power of voluntary attention and effort can 
best be quickened, by freedom or by compulsion, or 
rather by what combination of both. 

Again, in the so-called "Militarism," somebody not 
long since {N. Rott. C. ["New Rotterdam Cou- 
rant"], January 19 [1915], Avondblad A) thought 
he discovered as the characteristic element of the 
Germans the refusal to recognize the humanity in 
another creature. The hard discipline and above 
all the cases of ill-treatment in the barracks were 
instanced in proof. It was one more indication of 
the objective and earnest mind of the German that 

[75] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

Von Moltke in an appended reply, immediately and 
with grateful acknowledgments to the author of the 
article in question, admitted that rough characters 
had been guilty of such abuses and that there still 
remained much to be bettered. At the risk of being 
taken ior" plus Prussien que leroidePrusse" I'd like 
to make here another observation or so. A rough 
character is certainly not always a had character; 
roughness is sometimes the inverted form in which 
a genuine moral feeling expresses itself. Every 
one appreciates this fact from his own experience 
with men. We know, moreover, that, in every 
group of human beings which has any permanence, 
there is always forsooth one who shows himself 
perpetually and in all things the least and the least 
worthy — even if it be only in those characteristics 
most cried-up in the given milieu — and who thereby 
exposes himself to the tormenting spirit of his asso- 
ciates. Even here we have to do with a reaction, 
in which man's evaluating function is actively con- 
cerned. For my part, I should be much interested 
to know, whether the recruits that become a sacri- 
fice to such treatment do not perhaps belong in the 
great majority under this class of less worthy mor- 
tals. In that case we might consider it not mere 
cruelty, but rather an expression, obviously inverted, 
of moral feeling, of a feeling for human worth. 
Or is it not true that Homo Sapiens presents us 
specimens that would make a very angel lose pa- 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

tience? No, the essence of militarism is elsewhere 
to seek, — namely, in the essential, inspired readiness 
of the immense multitude of the people to throw 
body and soul, when needful, into the breach for 
the Fatherland. It is this willingness, too, which 
teaches them to endure the hard but necessary yoke 
of discipline, and ultimately renders their obedience 
a free and willing obedience, because consistent with 
one's own human worth. This readiness has enabled 
this people now for more than seven months to hold 
its place unshaken and unshakable, under circum- 
stances which would presumably have long since 
driven any other people to despair. Is the world, 
then, blind and deaf? Does it not see, does it not 
feel, that what Germany is now achieving is little 
less than a miracle ? — A miracle of tremendous will 
and earnestness, of immeasurable spirit and self- 
sacrifice f 

And mankind shall live to see still more, if the 
need become still more dire. For let no one deceive 
himself: Gennany is fighting for her life against a 
physically superior host which is coolly calculating 
her ruin. Ruthlessly upon her beautiful bloom it 
lays 

"die kalte Teufelsfaust entgegen." 

Peradventure, we will yet witness deeds of such 
classic simplicity and greatness that the scales will 
fall from the eyes of even the most blinded! But 

[77] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

what am I prating: is it not precisely the simple 
and the great that the average individual can never 
perceive, because his attention fastens, of itself, for- 
ever upon the small? He doesn't see the ocean, 
but the shells on the strand. 

Where would this people now be, without its 
much-abused army? The German army forms the 
very highest claim of this people to our honest ad- 
miration. It is wholly and simply coincident with 
the fact that the population has risen since 1870 
.from 40 to 68 millions. This people has still the 
courage, yes, to live as well as to die. It recognizes 
the Commonwealth and the duties of the individual 
toward the same. Just as the women still have the 
courage and the will to bear numbers of children 
and thus chronically to risk their lives for the 
Commonwealth, so the men have still the courage 
and the will to fight and thus acutely to risk their 
lives for the Commonwealth. Moreover, we have 
been given to poking fun — the German comic papers 
no less, in their earlier misconception — at the high 
position which the German officer occupies in soci- 
ety. But, duly considered, this position is virtually 
nothing else than the honor which properly belongs 
to a class of men who unceasingly, day by day, 
stand in readiness to give their lives for the Com- 
monwealth, that is, for all. That this is no mere 
phrase, the world can now well see. 

A strong proof of the moral earnestness of the 

[78] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

Germans is their objectivity with regard to their 
own defects — see von Moltke above — and their in- 
ner need to confess their guilt, even if it be only 
their tragic guilt. It is peculiarly true of the Ger- 
mans that the duty which had to give way in the 
moral conflict still makes its voice heard in the 
conscience. Sometimes they are driven to strong 
expressions merely to convince themselves that it 
was absolutely necessary to act so and not other- 
wise. Thus one gets expressions such as those of 
Bismarck, the man who was supposedly a monster 
of stone and steel but who in reality had to perform 
his hard duties with such a sensitive temperament 
that, on his own admission, he could never calmly 
design a militant policy after the day at Konigs- 
gratz when he had looked into the glazed eyes 
of a dying soldier. Such men would, indeed, 
prefer the course of Don Quixote in the moral 
conflict, — did not their mission drive them with 
iron necessity in the right direction. In this con- 
nection, mention ought to be made of the words 
which the Imperial Chancellor, in the Reichstag on 
August 4, 1914, devoted to the violation of Belgian 
neutrality. I incorporate them bodily. 

"Gentlemen, we are now under the necessity of 
self-defense, and Necessity knows no law! Our 
troops have occupied Luxemburg, have perhaps al- 
ready set foot upon Belgian territory. Gentlemen, 
that is contrary to the Law of Nations ! The French 

[79] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

government has, indeed, declared at Brussels its 
willingness to respect the neutrality of Belgium as 
long as the enemy respects it. But we knew that 
France stood ready for the attack. France could 
wait, we could not! A French attack upon our 
flank on the lower Rhine might have been fateful. 
So we were compelled to disregard the well- justified 
protest of the governments of Luxemburg and Bel- 
gium. The wrong — I speak frankly — the wrong 
that we thus do, we will seek to make good as soon 
as our military goal is achieved. One who is threat- 
ened as we are, one who is fighting as we are for his 
Highest and Best [sein Hochstcs], he dare think 
only of how to cut his way out." 

As I read these words for the first time, I felt a 
shudder of admiration, of deep moral awe. For 
conceive the situation clearly and sharply. Here was 
a people in unheard-of straits: suddenly exposed 
to a war upon both fronts against powerful foes. 
Under these circumstances it had, justly or unjustly, 
committed a deed, which that people well knew 
would be execrated throughout all lands as an un- 
heard-of violation of international law, and would 
stamp the doer as well-nigh the enemy of the human 
race, — a deed, furthermore, which forthwith gave 
a third tremendous opponent an opening also to mix 
in the strife. And in the National Assembly, in the 
hearing of the whole world, it was acknowledged 
with full objectivity according to duty and to con- 

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BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

science that this deed was a wrong and that the 
protests of the opposing party were justified ! This 
was acknowledged without beating about the bush, 
without any rhetoric, without fine phrases, without 
"sack-cloth and ashes" [''boetekleed"], and without 
anxiety as to the inevitable lack of comprehension 
which this acknowledgement would find among man- 
kind. The ethical conflict, the tragedy of the guilt, 
is revealed, though not expressly ; but the guilt itself 
is confessed with sorrow. If this is not the height 
of moral earnestness, then I know not where to 
seek it. The world, of course, interpreted it as the 
height of cynicism. 

It is so decidedly a height that it is a too much. I 
believe that in the times to come men will never men- 
tion without honor the position taken by the phi- 
losopher nearest the German throne. It loses noth- 
ing in that it was not discreet. The non-acknowl- 
edgment of wrong would have been in itself un- 
ethical; the acknowledgment in this form was a 
mistake, and in politics one of the results of the 
tragic conflict is that a mistake is often ^'pire qiiun 
crime'' ["worse than a crime"]. The Chancellor's 
words were beyond the comprehension or at least 
beyond the will-to-comprehend of the world, for 
whom they were intended, and for that reason did 
the German cause great harm. This was clear, or 
was made clear, ultimately to the Chancellor himself. 
Therefore, later — then naturally too late — he de- 

[81] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

fended the German action. The whole case is a 
sample of the way precisely the high ethical stan- 
dards of the Germans now and then mislead them 
into political blunders, when the political genius of 
a Bismarck is not inerrantly driving ahead in the 
right direction. Here lies undoubtedly one of the 
causes of their inferior adroitness in the profession 
of diplomacy. One of the strongest peculiarities of 
this profession is the way this exalted company 
speak among themselves a sort of oracle-language 
chiefly designed to conceal their ideas. (Just read 
that many-colored compilation which the various 
governments have put at the disposal of our in- 
quiring spirits, precious ''documents humains,'' val- 
uable only slightly, I take it, for the historian, but 
all the more for the psychologist and the moralist.) 
Obviously the task then becomes to grasp, to feel, 
to scent, instinctively to guess, to ferret out, what 
in fact the real meaning is. But we can never read 
any one's soul directly, only indirectly, by analogy or 
by sympathetic insight on the basis of the contents 
present in our own consciousness. Hence the proverb : 
''zooals de waard is, vertrouwt hij zijn gasten" 
["The inn-keeper trusts his guests according to his 
own character"]. Among such high gentlemen as 
Sassonof and Grey discussion is a fruitful amuse- 
ment only when one is in a position by affinity of 
soul to comprehend them, and to fathom their de- 
signs. It argues nothing against the ethical quality 

[82] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

of German diplomacy if it plays a losing game — on 
the contrary! There seems but one way out: the 
Germans should select as diplomats men of great 
imagination, who can transport themselves into mo- 
tives and thought-processes which are almost en- 
tirely foreign to their own minds. The point seems 
of the highest importance. 

All well and good, somebody will say; but, if 
the Germans stand ethically so high, whence, then, 
the general dislike? Should they not rather inspire 
love and admiration? 

No. The question is a witness to our naive opti- 
mism: great qualities do not always make one be- 
loved in this world — rather the reverse. This is 
something all great men have always known. Read, 
for example, in Ernest Hello's UHomme, the 
chapter "Le Monde" (pp. 108-118). What an army 
of foes, for example, the love of truth can accumu- 
late for us! Goethe knew: the truth-speakers 

"Hat man von je gekreuzigt und verbrannt." 

In two ways a man can bring general hatred, 
open or secret, down upon his head : by standing 
below or by standing above the average level. Be- 
low the average level Germany certainly does not 
stand. The conclusion may be left to the reader, 
who, after all the foregoing, will concede, I trust, 
something of my contention for the high moral level 
of this nation. And in the smelting furnace of this 

[83] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

tremendous war its spiritual qualities are destined 
to become yet stronger. 

Yet the proof of moral genius is scarcely pre- 
sented by all this. It cannot he presented a priori. 
It is one of the most difficult elements in the life 
of genius that it is a tree which can be known only 
by its fruits. 

But let me make a reference to one point: the 
oft observed readiness of the Germans to oblige 
[groote toegefelijkheid]. It may well go too far 
on occasion. The average individual is not obliging 
[accommodating], because he has no criterion of 
the essential and the non-essential. The genius can 
permit himself — and often gladly does permit him- 
self — to be obliging in all things that do not imperil 
his spiritual vocation. His stubbornness first be- 
gins when first his personality is involved. And here 
let me call attention to the concluding words of 
the above citation. The Chancellor did not say 
that Germany was fighting for her existence, but 
for her ''Highest and Best." I make free to trans- 
late the expression thus : "for her spiritual, her 
ethical, vocation." In any case, 

"Das Leben ist der Giiter hochstes nicht." 

Furthermore one might ask here if Germany's 
contribution to law does not already show achieve- 
ments of ethical genius. I cannot answer in my 

[84] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

present lack of adequate knowledge. The question 
would, moreover, lead us too far.^ 

So I will content myself with a reference to Her- 
mann Cohen's authoritative wartime address Ueber 
das Eigentiimliche des deiitschen Geistes. This ven- 
erable patriarch of the Marburg school, himself in 
lineage and still in religion (p. 23) a Jew, but know- 
ing himself one with the German people in a higher 
cultural fellowship, speaks (p. 4) expressly of the 
"world-historic originality" of that people, and that 
means in his mouth in the first instance ethical 
originality. 'This freedom of moral thinking and 
of the conscience became thus the historical charac- 
ter of the Reformation. And it is, perhaps, more 
than all other historical symptoms the most indubi- 
table mark of the German spirit" (p. 23). 

As manifestations of ethical genius he cites the 
creation of the German military organization by von 
Clausewitz and his associates under Kant's influ- 
ence,^ the immediate introduction of the universal 
franchise for the Reichstag and German initiative 
with respect to social law-making (pp. 32-35). 

"That which people reproach us for under the 
accusation of militarism is aimed chiefly at the 

5 Read, especially, the estimate of Germany by the Swede 
Rudolf Kjellen: Die Grossmdchte der Gegenzvart, 1914. For 
the Prussian code see above, pp. 67-68. 

^ Is it not a typical specimen of ethical narrowness that 
England has not been able to decide for universal military 
service, no matter how clearly necessity demanded it? 

[85] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

fact that in Prussia this idea of universal suffrage 
has not as yet been reaHzed." I'll permit myself a 
marginal note here. May not this retention in 
Prussia of a franchise, unquestionably out-of-date, 
have been occasioned in part by the fact that in this 
franchise there is present to a certain extent another 
very important principle — namely, the organization 
of individuals according to their trades and pro- 
fessions ? All — except those who don't work — hav- 
ing full rights, yet not as individuals but as workers, 
and all in the first instance politically effective in 
their natural group, the fellowship of their calling — 
that is, I take it, the basis of the state of the future. 
Prussia has realized the one factor, the German 
Empire the other. Neither is adequate by itself 
alone. See, e. g., as to the Reichstag the bitter 
judgment of H. S. Chamberlain, Kriegsaufsatze, 
pp. 38-40. (What people speaks with such dis- 
concerting objectivity, so "kilhl his an's Herz hinan" 
with regard to itself?) It is to be expected that 
Reichstag and Landtag^ will in the future both be 
refashioned in the sense above mentioned. (See 
p. 70.) 

In any case only the future can pass final judg- 
ment in the suit of Belgium versus Germany. Ger- 
many has taken upon her shoulders the guilt of 
wrong toward Belgium and in Belgium toward 
mankind. The essentially tragic character of that 

^ [Parliament of a single one of the German states.] 
[86] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

guilt can only be definitely established, if Germany 
in the future gives convincing evidences of ethical 
genius. For only upon this ground can her self- 
preservation — in service of the moral vocation of 
genius — be of more value than Belgium's personality, 
which has been violated, but which, as a part of an 
ethically requickened mankind, should receive in 
the end full recompense for the wrong. 

It may well be that the reader is by this time 
prepared to suspend judgment and to leave it to the 
future to administer justice to Germany. "Ven- 
geance is mine, saith the Lord." It is England's 
moral guilt that she did not leave the "vengeance" to 
God, but took it in hand herself, and that too not out 
of righteous indignation, but with her eye upon a 
personal advantage — that, besides, would have been 
adequately guaranteed by the promise of redress for 
Belgium, which Germany would only too gladly 
have given. 



[87] 



IX. 



IT remains now to examine more closely, in the 
light of all the foregoing, the case of Belgium 
versus Germany; and I shall now start from the 
hypothesis that Germany is a state, which, like the 
old Roman state, possesses the quality of moral 
genius, that she is, in a word, the sound, fertile and 
creative moral kernel of Europe, wholly dedicated 
to the vocation of putting her power at the service 
of the moral ideal, through creating and renewing 
Law on the one hand, and on the other through 
creating the further conditions for the unfolding 
of a free morality. 

It is clear that such a state cannot fulfil its moral 
vocation, unless certain conditions of an obvious 
sort are also fulfilled. In the first place, it must 
continue to exist; in the second place, it must exist 
under such circumstances as are indispensable for 
its work. It shares this dependence with every 
genius: even the greatest genius must be able to 
live and must find the conditions for its proper func- 
tioning; otherwise it perishes useless. 

It is furthermore clear that it is not merely for 

[88] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

the benefit of the state itself that the conditions 
aimed at be fulfilled ; on the contrary, the fulfilment 
has a social interest for all mankind, and indeed the 
very highest, mankind's one essential interest: the 
realization of the moral ideal. For this interest, 
sacrifices can be required of all other states; and, 
if their knowledge of the facts were great enough, 
their insight deep and their ethical will strong and 
earnest enough, they would then be glad to make 
them of their own free will. (To be sure, the neces- 
sary knowledge is impossible of complete attainment, 
as it is only subsequent events that can decide upon 
the quality of genius ; in lieu of these, we have to rely 
on intuition and faith.) If the insight and the will 
are not present, compulsion is unavoidable, just as 
a father has to use compulsion on his undeveloped 
children — not for his own good, but in the final 
purpose for theirs. 

And we now have here the delimitation which 
von Treitschke's theory requires. It holds only for 
the state with ethical genius. Inasmuch as von 
Treitschke by "the state" always meant Prussia, 
and believed in Prussia as in God himself, it is no 
wonder that he never became aware of the delimi- 
tation. 

In conclusion: is now this duty of the vocation 
of moral genius absolute? No. Here, too, the 
moral consciousness sets bounds. An individual of 
genius may not, even for the sake of his vocation, 

[89] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

annihilate physically or spiritually another individ- 
ual who does not aggressively threaten him (Dos- 
toiewsky, Guilt and Punishment), — for the possi- 
bility of reconciliation, of participation in the values 
when realized, is then destroyed. Therefore, at the 
time when Belgium had not manifested an active 
hostility, Germany had no right to annex her, as 
the German ultimatum, indeed, clearly indicated. 

Now what was the complexion of affairs for 
Germany at the beginning of August? She saw 
herself exposed to serious danger, if not of destruc- 
tion, at least of long and vital impairment of those 
conditions, under which she had to follow her moral 
vocation, her ''Highest and Best." She had one 
chance of getting the upper hand : to utilize the ad- 
vantage of her wonderfully organized method of 
mobilization and to anticipate the foe. To make 
full use of that advantage was entirely her right, — 
for in this very organization abides a wealth of 
valuable moral qualities; and, with might against 
might, any moral factor that gives one the upper 
hand is not only morally defensible but an impera- 
tive duty. However, to use that advantage, she had 
to pass over Belgian territory. Over against the 
duty toward her own moral vocation, rose that of 
respecting another state's personality. After all the 
foregoing, I now express the firm conviction : it zvas 



[90] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

unavoidable that the last-named duty shoidd yield 
to the first. 

Germany strove at first to bring about a com- 
promise, an adjustment, between the two duties. In 
the ultimatum to Brussels on August 2,^ on the one 
hand an unhindered passage was requested, but on 
the other, the integrity and subsequent independence 
of the kingdom was guaranteed, if Belgium's atti- 
tude remained friendly, and the promise given, be- 
sides, that the country would be vacated imme- 
diately after the war, all requisitions paid for in 
gold, and all damage made good. 

Only after the refusal on Belgium's part did the 
moral conflict take on the acute form of a complete 
suppression of the lower duty by the higher. 

There exists a peculiar symptom that England in 
her ''heart of hearts" is after all not entirely content 
with her behavior toward Belgium. I find that 
symptom in the fact that an Englishman has found 
it necessary to present to the unhappy knight errant, 
King Albert.... a book, the King Albert's Book. 
It was, for a fact, the time for books! And what 
a book ! Shakespeare would have said of it : "Words, 
words, words." It is an extraordinary compilation, 
contributed to by all sorts of celebrities, some also 
from other countries. More false feeling, hollow 
pathos, and hysterical exaggeration I have seldom 
seen between two covers. Every one who possesses 

1 German "White Book," No. 41. 

[91] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

the least moral instinct must perceive here the un- 
genuineness, the untruth. The lack of a real, a deep 
earnestness appears even in the outward form: all 
sorts of reproductions are interspersed, of which 
the majority have nothing to do with the matter in 
hand, and which give the whole volume the fraudu- 
lent appearance of a supplementary number of the 
Studio. That is no good cause which brings forth 
such things. The Germans at this moment are not 
making people presents of elegant books. 

But Belgium, too, was in an ethical conflict. She 
had on the one side the duty to preserve intact her 
state's personality, on the other side the higher 
duty, complementary to Germany's higher right 
grounded upon ethical genius, to put her territory 
at the service of the march to France along the 
natural and shortest route. As an individual state 
she had the former duty ; as a member of the Society 
of States the second. The concept of the Society of 
States and of the duty of all its members to make 
sacrifices for its highest ethical interests was here 
the newer concept in strife with the older one of 
the individual state and its duties. That our "feel- 
ing" sides with Belgium (see above) is entirely in 
accord with this ethical situation. We must sooner 
or later learn to think and to feel according to the 
higher morality, which Germany by her epoch- 
making deed has thus inaugurated. According to 

[92] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

this morality, states are no longer isolated entities, 
wholly based upon themselves, but members of a 
Society which lays down new rights and new duties 
— duties, which, e. g., in the case of a land that 
has been stamped geographically by nature herself 
as a strategic thoroughfare, take on, as a matter 
of course, the form of the particular duty to lay in 
the path of the more ethically endowed contestant, 
in the decision of an epoch-making suit whereon its 
very life depends, no artificial hindrances, — hin- 
drances which still recall the spirit of the Holy 
Alliance that imagined it could fashion historic real- 
ity by ingenious tinkering. 

So in the end one should come to perceive in this 
very act of the violation of Belgian neutrality an 
ethical new-creation, and thus a proof of ethical 
genius. The deep tragedy of the situation for Bel- 
gium — and in a way her justification, besides — was 
the fact that, in order to take the right course, she 
would have needed to possess an intuition of the 
ethical genius of Germany. And this requirement 
was naturally beyond her power. Genius can never 
be comprehended by the lesser; that lies in the 
nature of the case. Yet reality punishes us for 
the absence of the insight that the given moment 
demands, even though we were unable to possess it. 

A word, finally, on the significant purport which 
this whole trend of thought has for the foundations 

[93] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

of international law. International law is, as we 
have seen, properly no law at all, since it lacks the 
essential characteristic of compelling authority. It 
is just as little an entirely free morality, since it con- 
tains fixed rules, whether originating in custom or 
in deliberate international formulation. It is a sort 
of intermediate affair between law and ethics, a 
moral code, — formulations, the same for all cases, 
of what morality commands on definite points, or 
at least is supposed to command. 

Thus it performs the service of every moral code : 
it reduces the experience of free morality to rules 
which can become a guide of conduct for the weaker 
brothers, the unfree ones. It shares besides, how- 
ever, the difficulty implicit in every moral code: its 
rules, to which the multitude ascribes an absolute 
validity, must ever be in concrete situations of quite 
as little absolute validity as any ethical duty. If 
this is not perceived, the door is opened for wran- 
glings and diplomatic notes without end, and state- 
craft becomes 

"hochstens eine Haupt- und Staatsaktion 
Mit trefflichen pragmatischen Maximen, 
Wie sie den Puppen wohl im Munde ziemen." 

But the difficulty is doubled if, in addition, the 
rules established are founded upon a fiction, a fiction 
which is in flagrant contradiction to reality. Na- 
tional jurisprudence is also founded on a funda- 
mental fiction, i. e., that all individuals are of equal 

[94] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

importance: "The equality of all before the law." 
This is without danger, as the law requires of us 
only an ethical minimum, which the vast majority 
can fulfil without difficulty, while the repression of 
the less worthy minority is precisely the intention. 

In international law this is not so. It ordains no 
ethical minimum, but gives the full measure of that 
which is to be considered moral in the intercourse 
of states. It pretends to an entire control of the 
actions of states. If the fundamental principle is 
here fictitious, then that intercourse is falsified. 

The fundamental principle is fictitious. It con- 
sists in the supposition that all states as such are of 
equal value. That is not true. One state is more 
a state than another, and manifests in a higher 
degree the double characteristic of the state : power 
in the service of an ethical vocation. Not all states 
are alike powerful; not all states stand upon the 
same moral level. 

Thus, international law can well proceed upon 
the supposition that all states are equally justified, 
and have equal claims to sovereignty; but it can 
do so only at the cost of falsifying reality. 

The difference in power is ethically not indiffer- 
ent: it is entirely justifiable for a small state to 
give up some of its sovereignty, the better to achieve 
its ethical vocation. It then gets substantial ethical 
possessions in exchange for its formal independence. 
That is possible also without complete unification 

[95] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

with the other state, although Bavaria, for instance, 
is not hkely to repent of the step of 1871. This re- 
flection can become for our own country practically 
of exceeding significance. 

Theoretically of more importance seems to me 
the difference in moral level. That a state such 
as Servia is accorded full and regular membership 
in the European company of states, is a mockery of 
reality, and in addition a symptom of defective moral 
earnestness. It has had, too, the most disastrous 
consequences. It is noteworthy that, in the matter 
of the Austrian demands which touched the formal 
Servian sovereignty, it was not once during the 
negotiations asked simply, whether the concrete 
reality did not render it very just and very neces- 
sary to make those demands. Those demands con- 
flicted with the Servian sovereignty — and that was 
enough. So a concept, a word, the now once formed 
abstract term "sovereignty," provided Russia with 
her ''cheval de bataille" — for all that, however, only 
too practically useful for her own designs. Will 
we never learn not to fumble with words, but as 
rational, moral beings to operate with the naked 
reality itself? We must think in concepts. Is it 
thereby affirmed that we must slavishly act by con- 
cepts? Is not all acting concrete? It is true that 
reality makes much harder demands than the world 
of thought. Shall we ever learn to meet them? 
One thing is sure: the average rational and moral 

[96] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

level will have to be a good deal higher than it is 
now. At present, our practice, in the bonds of our 
always inadequate concepts, like a hobbled child 
shuffles weakly forward — and after all perhaps that's 
just as well. 



[97] 



As already observed, I have thus far disregarded 
. the mitigating circumstances cited by Ger- 
many ; partly, because only by so doing could I insure 
for the argument its complete theoretical force ; partly, 
because it appeared also practically most desirable to 
show that even with the utmost moral severity 
toward Germany we can pronounce at most a non 
liquet, and not a condemnation. 

But now both justice and completeness of treat- 
ment require some attention to Germany's own de- 
fence. 

This defence rests upon two contentions: the 
French attack, and the Belgian connivance. 

The former was immediately cited, the latter 
only sometime later. 

1. The French attack. On August 4, the Imperial 
Chancellor said : "The French government has in- 
deed declared at Brussels its willingness to respect 
the neutrality of Belgium as long as the enemy re- 
spects it. But we knew that France stood ready 
for the attack. France could wait, we could not ! A 

[98] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

French attack upon our flank on the lower Rhine 
might have been fateful." 

And a number of facts are cited by Germany, 
from which it would appear that France had already 
actually begun the attack by way of Belgium. Thus 
according to French wounded, a regiment of French 
soldiers had been brought to Namur^ as early as 
July 30, 1914; the town of Erquelinnes had been 
occupied by French troops before the outbreak of 
hostilites; French airmen had flown over Belgian 
territory; an automobile with French oflicers had 
undertaken by way of Belgium a first stroke on 
German soil.^ 

With regard to these facts, which are as posi- 
tively denied by the opposing party, I would submit : 
(1) that they are not sufficiently proven, (2) that, 
even if they were, they would be inadequate to 
establish the conviction that France had in fact the 
design, not simply to construe Belgian neutrality 
somewhat loosely, but to make by ivay of Belgium 
a vast strategic attack upon Germany. Yet that is 
the contention. The facts mentioned are, I think, to 
be viewed as nothing more than an almost acciden- 

1 Dr. Neukamp in "Deutschland und der Weltkrieg, darge- 
stellt von deutschen Volkerrechtslehrern" — "Sonderausgabe der 
Zeitschrift fiir Volkerrecht;' Band VIII, Heft 6, p. 10. 

2 O. Nelte, "Die belgische Frage," ibid., p. 205. The German 
ultimatum to Belgium speaks only of "the intended advance of 
French warring forces on the Maas between Givet-Namur," 
which "leave no doubt as to the intention of France to march 
on Germany through Belgian territory." 

[99] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

tal boiling-over, here and there, of the brimful 
seething kettle; they do not prove that the kettle 
was, by intention, soon to be poured out, or a for- 
tiori that the pouring-out had already begun. The 
contention seems to me, moreover, considering the 
whole situation, in fact without much initial plausi- 
bility. It is true that Belgium was through and 
through French in her leanings, and presumably 
would not have seriously opposed a French passage. 
And we do not know what influence the expected 
help of England presumably had upon the French 
frame of mind. Yet, notwithstanding, is it thinkable 
that France would ruin the game of her ally, who 
had now selected the neutrality of Belgium as her 
very castis belli ? Moreover, what benefit would the 
whole business have been to France ? Secure behind 
her well-fortified eastern boundary and behind Bel- 
gium, with no enemy at her rear, she could indeed 
wait — France could wait, we could not — and she 
would have committed a. blunder if she had ven- 
tured prematurely into the field. Every day's delay 
was for France a gain, for Germany an irretrievable 
loss. I believe that, on precisely the ground of an 
absence of benefit in attacking, we may well assume 
that it was the intention of France to maintain a 
waiting attitude.^ If Germany had done the same, 

^ Cf. Andre Weiss, La violation de la neutralite beige et 
luxembourgeoise, p. 23 : "Furthermore, what interest would 
France have had in carrying invasion and war into Belgian 
territory, without having been provoked thereto ?" — Quite right ! 

[100] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

there would then have arisen a situation where 
each would have been defiantly laying for the other. 
That Germany did not, could not do so, lay not in 
the attitude of France, but in the menace of Russia 
in her rear: 'Trance could wait, zve could not." 
There is really a contradiction in the explanation 
of the Imperial Chancellor: (1) France stood ready 
for the attack; (2) France could wait. The second, 
though of course logically not inconsistent with 
the first, cancels its significance practically, and pre- 
cisely on this account it becomes clear that Ger- 
many's real reason for entering Belgium was not 
the attitude of France but the critical situation in 
which Germany found herself. The critical situa- 
tion, born of the Russian danger at her back, ren- 
dered it imperative not alone to be beforehand as 
to a possible attack from France, but no less, by 
means of the strongest possible offensive, to use to 
the utmost the advantage which her superior system 
of mobilization bestowed. That is the fact and 
there is no earthly reason for dodging it. Germany 
coidd not zvait; and on this account, and on this 
alone, she marched forth. 

The plea of self-defense, as argued for example 
by Professor J. Kohler,* will not do because the 
actual basis, the attack itself, is lacking. Professor 
Kohler, indeed, admits this implicitly in the state- 
ment : ''Every one has the right to ward of¥ an un- 
*Notwehr und Neutralitdt, pp. 32-36. 

[101] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

justifiable attack, and, furthermore, he need not 
wait till he is struck; he has the right to fall upon 
the fellow who intends striking, and to cut him 
down or shoot him dead." Is that so? Can one 
speak of self-defense in a case of mere prevention? 
The drafter of our Criminal Code^ in his comments 
on art. 41 proves to be of another opinion. "There 
is no state of self-defense without (1) unlawful 
assault, (2) imminent danger to one's own or an- 
other's body, honor, or property, (3) necessity of 
the committed action, as the one and only protec- 
tion against the danger actually occasioned by the 
assault." With respect especially to the first point, 
I should say that the fact of the attack would then 
have to be actually present; since, otherwise, there 
is necessarily a lack of the indispensable complete 
certainty that the attack will really take place. Any 
one who in such a case becomes preventively the 
aggressor acts presumably with entire ethical justi- 
fication; but he does not act in self-defense [nood- 
weer], but at most in distress [noodstand], where 
the duty of self-preservation calls louder than usual. 
Moreover, the self-defense theory needs a sup- 
porting theory to explain the fact that the assault 
was not upon the understood aggressor France but 
in the first instance upon the neutral third party 
Belgium. On this matter. Professor Kohler says 

5 Cf. Mr. [= Meester] H. J. Smidt, Geschiedenis van het 
Wetboek van Strafrecht, I, p. Z77. 

[102] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

(p. 33), that, by virtue of the aggressive attitude 
of France, the Belgian territory — the "precincts" 
of the third party — became an instrumentality for 
the attack: "But I have a right to render instru- 
mentahties of attack inoperative, even when they 
belong to an innocent third party; anything that 
is useful for the attack, however innocent in itself, 
falls under the law of self-defense and actions of 
self-defense." And he makes this comparison: If 
I am shot at from a house of a third party, I may 
shoot into that house. 

But I really think that the German cause is badly 
served in such fashion. Omnis comparatio claudicat 
[Every comparison limps], but this one so badly 
that it ceases to have any value at all. It would 
be in season, if the act to be defended consisted 
simply in the fact that Germany had violated Bel- 
gian neutrality only on a small scale, i. e., by way 
of a "simple passage" through some outlying rela- 
tively unimportant section. Such slight violations 
are considered admissible by all exponents of inter- 
national law.*' Here, however, the afifair is of so 
much more serious sort that (to use the Hegelian 
expression) quantity changes into quality. Here it 
is not the Belgian house, but Belgium herself, the 
personality of the Belgian state, that is assaulted 



^ K. Strupp, Vorgeschichte und Ausbruch des Krieges von 
1914, p. 189, where he quotes a remark of Lawrence : "extreme 
necessity will justify a temporary violation of neutral territory." 

[103] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

and made continuously to serve the German pur- 
pose. And for this — see above, p. 42 — an appeal 
to self-preservation in distress does not suffice, be- 
cause the personality of the Belgian state is not 
a priori inferior to that of the German, and no one 
free personality may be used merely as a means to 
another's end. 

The question ought, then, to be put thus: if a 
possible attacker shields himself behind a third per- 
son, what right have I over against this third? 

The answer ought to be, I think: if the third 
person is innocent, impartial, and implicated without 
his consent, then I am obligated to spare him, unless 
there exists between him and me a difference in 
value not only quantitative but qualitative — as here 
the quality of ethical genius — that renders my self- 
preservation objectively of greater moment than his 
being spared. 

If the third party is innocent. If he is not, and 
I know it, then this fact exculpates me, if I treat 
him as an enemy or at least do not spare him. 

So we come to the second point. 

2. The Belgian Connivance. One can find all the 
facts, with the documents in facsimile, under two 
covers in the German official publication. Die hel- 
gische Neiitralit'dt. We know them of course in sub- 
stance from the so-called ''Briisseler Dokumente." 
They show the following: 

1. In 1906 Belgium had entered at England's sug- 

[104] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

gestion upon very detailed discussions of Anglo- 
Belgian cooperation in case of war. The English 
army was to land at French ports, from which it 
appears that France too was implicated in the affair. 
England, for her part, emphasized that "our con- 
versation was absolutely confidential."^ Diplomacy 
too was bestirring itself, as appears from the report 
of April 10, 1906, of the Belgian General Ducarne 
to his government, and especially from a letter dated 
December 23, 1911, of the then Belgian envoy at 
Berlin, Baron Greindl, who warned his government 
most earnestly of the consequences of such politics. 
The document of 1906 lay in an envelope with the 
significant label '^Conventions anglo-belges" [Anglo- 
Belgian Agreement^. 

2. The discussions comprised under ( 1 ) expressly 
referred only to a possible case of German violation 
of Belgian neutrality and Belgian request for assis- 
tance against such violation. 

From a second document (of 1912), it appears, 
however, not only that the discussions were still 
going on, but that now England flatly declared that 
in any case [''en tout eiat de cause"'], troops were to 
disembark in Belgium, since Belgium would not be 
in a position to resist the Germans. In the course of 
six years the relation of Belgium to England was 
evidently becoming continually more dependent. 
This jibes entirely with an utterance of Lord Roberts 
■^ [Quoted in French.] 

[105] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

in The British Review of August, 1913, concerning 
the situation at the time of the Morocco crisis in 
1911 : "Our expeditionary force was held in equal 
readiness instantly to embark for Flanders to do 
its share in maintaining the balance of power in 
Europe." 

3. There were found, furthermore, a lot of blanks 
intended for English requisitions in Belgium; four 
parts of a purely secret handbook prepared by the 
English general staff in cooperation with Belgium; 
finally, on the person of the English embassy-secre- 
tary. Grant Watson, arrested at Brussels, a number 
of other documents : which, taken together, furnish 
the logically indisputable proof that there had ex- 
isted for years an Anglo-Belgian cooperation in 
preparation of a campaign in Belgium.^ 

What relevancy has this fact for the moral judg- 
ment ? 

As far as concerns Belgium, it constitutes an utter 
abandonment of her neutrality duties — which cer- 
tainly permitted no partizan relationship. Even if 
we grant that her neutrality seemed endangered 
from the German side, still by binding herself hand 

8 The defence of the Belgian government, which appeared 
only at the beginning of March, contains nothing substantial. 
It is, to say truth, a suspicious mixture of French "phrase'' and 
English "cant." The content is to be found also in Emile 
Brunet, Calomnies allemandes. Les Conventions anglo-belges. 
It is not worth while going into particulars. For an impartial 
judge the proof is adequate; though it can convince no one, 
of course, who doesn't want to be convinced. 

[106] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

and foot to the other party, which on its side flatly 
announced its intention of operating in Belgium 
even without her consent, she pitched matters so 
much from the frying-pan into the fire that we can 
interpret her conduct not as a mere mistake, but 
as guilt pure and simple. Belgium might have been 
already warned by her moral sense when she per- 
ceived in 1906 that the conversations were absolutely 
confidential, in other words, were not to be com- 
municated to the other guarantors, especially Ger-. 
many. This was self-evident, for otherwise they 
would have been without meaning ; yet for this very 
reason her unlawful procedure is patent. 

The sympathy we feel for Belgium is, since these 
revelations, not free from that nuance of hesitating 
condescension which our pity takes on when it is 
hampered by an absence of intellectual and moral 
respect. What a well-nigh inconceivable fact, be- 
sides, that these documents were left behind! 

For the ethical worth of England's attitude, for 
her utilization of the Belgian question as casus belli, 
this affair is the death-blow — (if such were still 
needed) — la mort sans phrase.^ 

^ The Times of March 8 throws the whole fiction overboard. 
This sudden, cynical unmasking is truly astounding. Up to 
that time people had left the truth on this point to Mr. Bernard 
Shaw {Common Sense about the War). There must be a 
very definite reason for the Times adopting Shaw's role now. 
But what? The matter makes an "uncanny" impression — as 
if the English people were losing all inner control, all sense 
of proportion and right. Is it, indeed, that we are really liv- 
ing to see the beginning of an end? 

1107] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

But for the judgment on Germany's attitude 
toward Belgium's neutrality — and that is ultimately 
our point — the Brussels discoveries are entirely in- 
different. Indeed, for any moral judgment on an 
action, the question is not what circumstances were 
objectively given, but how these circumstances were 
subjectively conceived. That Germany later on ac- 
quired knowledge of the real situation, in no sense 
alters the fact that she acted in the first instance 
without such knozvledge. 

Or is this last, after all, not so? Were there 
found at Brussels merely official proofs of what was 
actually already known? If so, then the Chancel- 
lor's speech of August 4, 1914, that made no men- 
tion of this all-decisive point, is no longer simply 
a Quixotism, but downright clumsiness. 

We are now often given to understand by Ger- 
many, that, in truth, ''the discovered manuscripts 
but furnish the documentary proof of Belgian con- 
nivance with the Entente-powers, a fact known to 
the authorities long before the outbreak of the 
war."^^ So, too, in Die belgische Neutralitdt, p. 5 : 
"The Imperial Chancellor did not know as yet, al- 
though he already surmised, that he had a right to 
employ quite different language." 

But assertion is not proof. If Germany wishes 
our moral judgment to accept, among the motives 

^0 Dr. H. F. Helmolt, Die geheime Vorgeschichte des Welt- 
krieges, p. 6Z. 

[108] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

for her conduct, the fact also of the EngHsh-Belgian 
entente, she must then make clear by pertinent evi- 
dence that the fact was known to Germany at the 
beginning of August, 1914/^ Such a proof would 
lead at once to acquittal. Otherwise, the case rests 
where my main argument left it, non liquet; though 
personal faith in Germany's vocation subjoins to this 
a conviction that the future will bring the full moral 
reconciliation and consequently the acquittal. 

I feel, however, that even this may not be the 
last word. Life often presents situations, pro- 
foundly affecting our interests but kept hid by the 
other party concerned, of which we have not the 
least objective knowledge, but rather a sort of intui- 
tive, practical certainty. An excellent example is 
conjugal unfaithfulness. One may know nothing 
and yet be in mind and soul thoroughly convinced.^^ 

11 The Chancellor's speech of December 2, 1914, plainly in- 
dicates that the Anglo-Belgian connivance was brought into 
the discussion officially not to exonerate Germany but to set 
forth the real nature of England's motive in the war. 

12 Of course there are usually some factual indications too. 
In the present case, for example, the disposition of the Belgian 
fortifications, the Belgian fear of German industrial competi- 
tion, the general leanings to France and the strong anti-German 
sentiment in Belgium. Compare the warm and meaty compo- 
sition of Conrad Borchling: Das helgische Problem ["The Bel- 
gian Problem"] (in the series, "Deutsche Vortrage hamburgi- 
scher Professoren" ["German Lectures of Hamburg Profes- 
sors"]). There, for example, p. 5: "The way our opponents 
conceive this neutrality may be most strikingly summarized in 
the proposition formulated by the Paris newspaper, Le Na- 
tional, on November 16, 1834: The day will come when the 
neutrality of Belgium, in case of a European war, will dis- 
appear before the will of the Belgian people Belgium will 

[109] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

If in such a situation there comes a moment when 
one has to act, then those who ail from Hamlet's 
"pale cast of thought" will hesitate, consider, weigh 
.... and, as a reward for their moral earnestness, be 
knocked over by the other party and treated by the 
bystanders with ironic pity and contempt. Such 
crises require the free, firm hand of genius, the 
courage to ''go to it," with the old sailor-prayer 
"God zcgen de greep"'^^ [''God bless the grip"], and 
to break through the cobweb of lies, at the risk of 
committing some great and irretrievable wrong. But 
the genius of the act lies precisely herein that the 
actor is, in ways beyond reason, convinced that this 
risk is slight. I believe that this sort of genius is 
one of the most indispensable factors in a great 
statesman. ^^ We miss it in the all too conscious 
reasonings of the Imperial Chancellor. 

So we are beginning to doubt, too, if it looks well 

range herself naturally on the side of France!'" [I'll copy 
this important and little known citation in the original : "Le 
jour viendra oii la neutralite de la Belgique, en cas de guerre 
europeenne, disparaltra devant le voeu du peuple beige. .. .La 
Belgique se rangera naturellement du cote de la France!"^ Is 
it not, taken all in all, truly marvelous that the English presen- 
tation has made such easy way into men's minds? How well 
she knows her public... and how she must despise it. Was 
there really any well-informed person to whom Germany's 
appearance on the scene offered anything for shocked surprise? 
VVould not Sir Edward Grey in private gladly entrust his last 
penny to the Imperial Chancellor? Can he look Mr. Asquith, 
his fellow-augur, in the face without laughing? 

^3 [I. e., the grip on the oar, rudder, rope, or possibly some 
weapon of attack.] 

1* Cf. Frederick the Great in 1756. 

[110] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

for Germany to make the effort to present the above- 
mentioned proof — her ''reasons grounded in knowl- 
edge." Perhaps H. S. Chamberlain^^ says here the 
right word : ''Nor do I consider the explanations and 
excuses now eagerly proffered at all happy. They will 
only breed more insolence. Qui s' excuse s'accuse is 
one of the truest sentiments ever uttered. Do what is 
right and let the ousiders take it out in talk ! How 
fine would it have been if the Germans had, after a 
brief notification, simply marched into Belgium. 
What good did it do to interrogate England and to 
offer apologies ! The initiated knew then already 
what the whole world knows to-day. Everything 
was bound to be cleared up soon enough, and the 
effect would have been much greater, if the authori- 
ties had kept in dignified reserve. For the same con- 
flict that had happened before was at issue now, the 
contest, as Carlyle puts it, 'between noble German 
veracity and obstinate Flemish cunning.' " 

15 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the briUiant, somewhat 
too "Pan-Germanic," English-born and French-educated Ger- 
man author of widely known philosophical works. Labberton 
cites from his German text, Kriegsaufsdtze, p. 93. The version 
above is not my translation, but Chamberlain's own English 
from his English pamphlet England and Germany — distributed 
gratis by him "for readers in neutral countries."] 



[Ill] 



XI. 



I ANTICIPATE another objection,— relatively 
justified and hence demanding some discussion. 
A moral right over against another person can only 
rest upon a moral duty of the person acting, for the 
performance of which that right is indispensable. 
Can the moral right of war be established? Is war, 
is this war, for Germany a moral duty? 

In these last words I've split the question into 
two. But the former, the moral justification of war 
in general, is no question. War is an action, an 
action of a state; and actions in themselves are 
neither moral nor immoral. Moral or immoral is 
alone the will which expresses itself in the action. 
War is the necessary, the only possible result of the 
clashing of the irreconcilable decisions of two na- 
tional wills. If two national wills — or two individ- 
ual wills — come into conflict with each other, there 
are then three possibilities: one gives in; both give 
in in part so that a compromise results; or the one 
will breaks the other with all the instruments of 
power whose use is not forbidden by the moral con- 
sciousness — and let it be here remembered that the 

[112] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

moral consciousness knows no fixed rules, but only 
concrete actions. If the state is a wise state, it will 
then look into itself to see whether its decision is 
essential, i. e., whether its decision touches its moral 
vocation. If that is not the case, it gives in, wholly 
or in part (as Germany did more than once). If 
the state is foolish or bad, then it will hold fast — 
and without compelling inner reasons — to its initial 
decision, and strive to put that decision through on 
lower grounds of passion (as France) or of self- 
interest (as England). Such a war may be foolish, 
but it is not, as such, necessarily immoral. For it 
has, indeed, a goal beyond itself; it is means to 
solution of problems, means to world-forming. Only 
absolutely immoral is war for war's sake, for the 
sake of nothing else than the direct result of war, 
namely, the weakening of the opponent, — with 
whom no concrete differences existed, but whose 
power stood simply in the way of ourselves — of our 
egotism — without, as such, thwarting our vocation. 
That is the type of wars that England again and 
again has unleashed upon the continent — and, for 
the most part, to boot, left for her allies to fight 
out, and so got double profit.^ 

But, as we have seen, for the wise state, too, the 
possibility that war may result is by no means ex- 

1 [Zoodat het mes van twee kanten sneed, "so that the knife 
(Engl, ax) cut both ways," but in English the proverb has 
come to mean often "to get hoist with one's own petard" — a 
very different matter!] 

[113] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

eluded. This we can find — as everything else — 
superlatively expressed in a little poem of Goethe's : 

"Was euch nicht angehort, 
Miisset ihr meiden. 
Was euch das Innre stort 
Dilrft ihr nicht leiden. 
Dringt es gewaltig ein, 
Miisset ihr tiichtig sein : 
Liebe nur Liebende 
Bringet hinein." 

War becomes a lofty, an unavoidable duty which 
it were perdition to shirk, if ''the inner life" is 
threatened. But aggressive war may also be an 
ethical duty. For the ethical, the moral urge within 
us is in its deepest nature expansive : it is not satis- 
fied with its own ethical completion [volmaking], 
but is inexorably driven to work, besides — as far 
as in its power — on the completion of the whole 
world. 

It will remain eternally "idea," never fully to be 
realized here upon earth; but it strives unceasingly 
thitherward. It is prompted by the fulness of its 
being to labor, according to its abilities, for the 
establishment of the divine, for the "Incarnation 
of the Word," though the fulness of its kingdom 
is not of this world (see the conclusion of Faust, II). 

So, in considering the existence of war, I come 
practically to the same results as does Steinmetz 
in his Philosophie des Krieges, though upon other 
grounds. I believe that only the man whose sense 

[114] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

of reality is so developed that his ethical insight 
has led him into the mysterious deeps of per- 
sonality can fully understand war in all its vast and 
sublime, its fated unavoidability. This insight is 
toto coelo different from the romantic-mystic glori- 
fication of war, which had been tried out before. 
It glorifies war least of all ; it views war as a most 
heavy and terrible task', it is not romantic, but 
realistic. And, finally, I believe that Professor Stein- 
metz, if he came to think the ethical side entirely 
through, would come really to the same insight; 
indeed that he really proclaims the same, — 

"Nur mit ein bischen andren Worten." 

On pages 7 and 8 of his Philosophie des Krieges 
we read: ''Social utilitarianism in the deepest sense 
would be then the real content of all morality;" and 
"evolutionary utilitarianism in the deepest sense, en- 
riched by the ideal of race, constitutes the highest 
and broadest ethics which we can conceive, the only 
ethics, moreover, that can satisfy us critically." 

But for me this ethics is not in the least critically 
satisfying. Utilitarianism, as against formal ethics 
in the sense of Kant, Lipps and Heymans, is to this 
extent the same that it seeks for ethical values; but 
it is not the same, where it purports to be able to 
reduce the values all to social utility. I may consider 
myself excused from a specific critique of utili- 
tarianism. Plenty of such critiques are ready to 

[115] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

hand. In reply to Professor Steinmetz it is enough 
to point out that it is simply impossible to ''enrich" 
utilitarianism with any ideal whatever, without es- 
sentially canceling it past recovery. An ideal, a 
Platonic-Kantian ''idea," operating in the world of 
concrete reality as an urge, as ''dunkler Drang," 
concerns itself not w^th utility, not even with social 
utility — albeit in "the deepest sense"; but simply 
and solely Avith its own realization, for the very 
sake of that realization, without additional utili- 
tarian considerations, without hope of reward. 

Therefore, when Professor Steinmetz abandons 
utilitarianism as even for him untenable, when, be- 
sides, he sets, in place of his "ideal of race," the 
general moral ideal that includes all ideals, and hence 
also the ideal of race, we are then entirely agreed. 

But what is the moral ideal in its fundamental 
demand, as made not concretely upon an individual, 
but in general upon the whole world? We are un- 
able to tell. It appears in the creative activities of 
living, in the slow omvard weaving of 
"Der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid." 

It is, as Stefan George once so profoundly said^ 
in a sort of dialogue with the moral ideal: 

" 'Du sprichst mir nie von Siinde oder Sitte.' — 
'Ihr, meine Schiiler, Sprossen von Gebliit, 
Erkennt und kiirt das Edle unbemiiht, 
Auch heimlich bin ich Richie eurer Tritte.' " 

^ Der Teppich des Lehens, p. 21. 
[116] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

Again, no one can tell how a morally ideal world 
would look as to content, since ethical wisdom, the 
knowledge of values, can arise only in and through 
the historic process of becoming. But as we do 
know the nature of ethical intention [ge^indheid, 
feeling], — so brilliantly analyzed by Professor Hey- 
mans, — we can tell how it would look, as to form. 
It would manifest this characteristic: that then all 
states would in practice ''have become objects to them- 
selves" [German, "mmi Ohjekt gezuorden''] ; that 
means, they would, every instant with entire free- 
will, assume such place and such influence in the 
whole order as befitted their moral worth — whatever 
it were — for the sum total of the Community of 
States. Only when this condition is fulfilled, will 
warfare be necessary no more. "Einstweilen/' how- 
ever, 

"Einstweilen, bis den Lauf der Welt 
Philosophie zusammenhalt, 
Erhalt sich das Getriebe 
Durch Hunger und durch Liebe." 

The war now raging, for instance, could only 
then have been prevented, if England, recognizing 
that Germany as a member of the Community of 
States possessed a greater value than now in her 
actual position was accorded her, had then of her 
own free will made room by yielding something of 
her own overplus of place. Let one once try to 
think his way into this conception; and, when he 

[117] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

reacts with the judgment "that is unthinkable," he 
has then at the same time thereby pronounced logical 
and ethical sentence upon every form of pacifism,^ 
and the situation continues to remain, as presented 
in Goethe's words: 

"Traumt ihr den Friedenstag? 
Traume, wer traumen mag ! 
Krieg heisst das Losungswort, 
Sieg, und so klingt es fort " 

3 There is a certain Paul Otlet, who has worked out, in the 
midst of beleaguered Brussels, a "chart mondiale" ["world- 
chart"], down to all details, to regulate the whole world for all 
future times, without possibility of further strife ! It is scarcely 
possible to understand what's going on inside the heads of such 
fellows. They are simply children, physically grown up, who 
in the midst of the stress of reality continue to play with their 
toys. {La iin de la guerre, 1914). At bottom his method is 

that of the Congress of Vienna, whose work resulted in a 

whole series of wars ! 



[118] 



XII. 



THUS far on the moral right of war in general. 
But this particular war ? It is remarkable how 
the question as to the moral right of the parties is met 
by almost every one in identical fashion with the 
question : who began it ? Who was the aggressor ? 
Who let loose the storm that now rages over the 
world? It seems to me that it is unworthy of Ger- 
many to take part in this. 

Even an aggressive war can he — see above — per- 
fectly moral, absolutely defensible. This whole line 
of thought is really pacifistic: it begins with the 
assumption that war is an evil in itself.^ It is this 
assumption which entirely controlled the diplomatic 
negotiations, now lying before us in the divers 
''books,'* at least from the side of the Entente- 

^ [It is not for me to say much — but I cannot permit my 
dissent to go unexpressed. There is a still deeper conception 
of war than Labberton's deep conception — and that conception 
must consider it "an evil in itself," and an evil that the re- 
sources of the moral intelligence of mankind can and must 
work to abolish. Life can be solved without murder. .. .some- 
time. Indeed, it is precisely "in itself," i. e., absolutely, that 
war is an evil ; it takes on the only good it has when it is 
considered not "in itself," but in relation to relatively good 
ends, at present only to be achieved through war, as it seems.] 

[119] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

powers. There was an affair to settle, the Austrian- 
Servian, or, more broadly, the German-Slavic ques- 
tion. The affair pressed for adjustment, it was 
"jus constitiiendiim.'" That left the Entente-party 
entirely cold; it was preoccupied wnth but one aim 
— to avoid war. At least it was so in appearance. 
{In the case of Russia this can have been nothing at 
all but appearance. That lies in reason. Or was 
she only in appearance involved in the Servian in- 
terests? One or the other!) Had this will-in- 
appearance [schijn-zml] triumphed, there would 
have been no war, and the affair would have re- 
mained as it zvas, i. e., the world would not have 
advanced a step upon the path of historical-political 
improvement. It was the veritable peace-movement, 
with the finger on the trigger and the eyes riveted 
on the finger of the other fellow. It was, in a word, 
a living, — and considering the contrast with the 
ever threatening mobilizations — a comic illustration 
of the situation which would ensue if pacifism, con- 
trary to all likelihood, should unexpectedly achieve 
its desire : peace, yet not the true, essential, inner 
peace, but only the outward order, the stillness of 
death, where all growth, all solution of pending and 
pressing problems, would be evermore impossible — 
the whited sepulcher, the final triumph of the Phari- 



2 [But "aflFairs" can be "settled" by thinking no less than by 
fisticuffs.] 

[120] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

And who was, then, really the aggressor ? When 
one probes this question, not superficially but to the 
bottom, it resolves itself into empty nothingness, 
and one is simply face to face, once again, with 
the fated necessity of the entire event. 

All the governments, moreover, have been con- 
descending enough to provide us with a whole varie- 
gated compilation of data in answer to the some- 
what school-boy question: *'who began it?" One 
would have to be more naive than is the present 
writer — to his sorrow, or rather not to his sorrow 
— in order to believe that all this was done with the 
essential and serious purpose of making clear the 
truth. 

This reflection, however, gives the historian no 
right, as far as he is concerned, to consign without 
more ado the publications in question to the shelf 
of children's books. To be sure, the spectrum isn't 
altogether complete; there is, as far as I know, no 
"green" book, — and ''indigo" and "violet" books 
are hardly to be expected; yet nevertheless he may 
faintly hope that the available colors, taken together, 
could bring forth something at least approaching 
the unbroken light of truth. It would be a sort of 
spectral synthesis, the reverse of the spectral anal- 
ysis of the astronomers. 

However it be, all Europe has seized upon these 
"books" with passionate zeal and studied them over 
from a to s, only skipping such letters as could 

[121] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

not serve the proof of what stood fixed a limine, 
that is, that the other party ''had done it," — the 
enemy, or, among neutrals, the party which en- 
joyed the antipathy of the demonstrator. Mean- 
time, that the demonstrandum, beforehand so fixed, 
seemed deduced with such relatively slight difficulty 
from the available data, proves apparently that 
among the data themselves something must be miss- 
ing, which must be supplied, with tacit insertion in 
the spirit desired, before the conclusion is possible. 
And so it is in fact. The conclusion to which 
one comes through the study of these books, at least 
with respect to the question of Austria-Germany 
vs. Russia, depends entirely on the conception one 
has of the Austrian ultimatum to Servia, and the 
conception can he nothing hut a preconceived con- 
ception, because there are in the diplomatic corre- 
spondence no data whatever adequate for an answer 
to the question, what were the real motives of this 
Austrian activity and zvhat idea Austria had of the 
consequences that this activity zvould or coidd have. 
No one is likely to be so naive as to suppose that the 
note of July 23, 1914, simply fell out of the air. 
The French ''Yellow Book" contains, indeed, some 
pieces that don't say much (Nos. 7-21) from before 
the note — so, too, the Austrian "Red Book" (Nos. 
1-7) — and in the report which the English ambassa- 
dor at Vienna, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, gave out to 
his government on September 1 we read : "It was 

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BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

from a private source that I received on the 15th 
July [sic^ the forecast of what was about to happen 
which I telegraphed to you the following day."^ 
We can rest assured that, when Austria sent her 
note, the telegraph apparatus between the great cap- 
itals had not been idle all those weeks, and that 
Austria had thus good grounds for the belief that 
to a certain extent the cards were already dealt and 
the play already determined. This conviction is 
strengthened, moreover, by the impression made by 
many of the published documents as if really these 
gentlemen were continually telling each other things 
which each of them could and must have known all 
along.* So, for example, as to Belgian neutrality: 
every expert could know and did know — if it were 
only by virtue of the German strategic lines to the 
Belgian boundary — that Germany had for some time 
felt the impracticability, in the more and more 
threatening European war, of eventually respecting 
that neutrality. Nevertheless the negotiations pro- 
ceeded as if it was a most weighty and a most un- 
settled point. I fancy we must construe many — not 



2 Great Britain and the European Crisis, p. 81. 

* Another impression these documents make is this : it never 
depends upon the matter pending whether there's to be war or 
not, but only upon the question, determined by the proportion 
of power, whether the desire for war exists. If it doesn't, then 
the weakest gives in, does'nt find the "matter" so serious, 
doesn't get huffy about it. If the desire is there, then at once 
all becomes momentous and grave. All, of course, sheer make- 
believe. 

[123] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

all — of these documents as the official declarations 
[constateeringen] of the positions and contentions 
of each side, unchangeable as to the future of the 
case and as to history, but containing in themselves 
for the parties concerned nothing new. It is in a 
way the public performance — or a performance in- 
tended later for the public — of a theatrical piece, the 
general tenor of which was long since definitely 
fixed; to be loosely compared with an open sitting 
of a parliament in its relation to the preceding 
negotiations and discussions in private which had 
already really settled the whole affair. 

Therefore, as to Austria's note an objective judg- 
ment is impossible ; and, consequently, as to the sec- 
ond point, alx)ut which the arguments are forever 
twisting and turning: whether it was the Russian 
mobilization or the German ultimatum that was 
precipitous and hence the spark in the powder. If 
one sides with Austria in the matter of the note, 
then the Russian mobilization was needlessly ag- 
gressive and thus indefensible; if one condemns the 
note, then the mobilization was commendable cau- 
tion, and hence the German ultimatum constitutes 
the ''attack." He who can get effectively out of this 
vicious circle with the data given is a cleverer man 
than the present writer; but he who only thinks he 
can, knows still less than the same, for he himself 



[124] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

doesn't know that he doesn't know. It may serve us 
here to remember Socrates.^ 

What motives and conceptions of the results may 
we suppose Austria to have had? There was the 
given necessity of teaching Servia a lesson. The 
question was : Will the Entente permit this without 
taking a hand? We know that the armaments of 
the immediately preceding period had been notice- 
ably increased, so that all could see "dat de hoel 
op spring en stond" [''that the whole business was 
ready to explode"]. Did Austria know that its 
note would be the spark in the powder? Assume 
she did, then the supposition is justified that she 
thought : 'Tf, for this my good cause they really want 
to unleash the European war, then the situation is 
through and through so morally rotten that it must 
come to-morrow or the day after, and, if it must 
come anyway, then the sooner the better." The un- 
deniable fact that the "suaviter in mo do" was neg- 
lected, can then be interpreted as the manner whereby 



5 A comical gentleman is Herr Van der Goes, who on page 
27 of his brochure Aan zvie de schuld^ ["Who is to Blame?"] 
quite correctly censured in another man's brochure Engelands 
rol bij het uitbreken van den wereldstrijd ["England's Role 
in the Outbreak of the World War"] the above mentioned 
petitio principii on the Austrian side of the argument, only to 
adopt it himself with entire contentment and enviable aplomb 
in his own bad logic — on the opposite side. So it goes with 
all these arguments. It was at first, maybe, a pretty little 
game ; but it becomes boresome. Chess is really much prettier : 
one isn't tied down to any data, but invents them as he goes 
along. 

[125] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

the earnest will not to give in at any price manifested 
itself a limine. 

The German ''White Book" contains two clauses 
that support this supposition : "We were well aware 
that an eventual military procedure on Austria- 
Hungary's part toward Servia might bring Russia 
in, and involve ourselves in a war, as in duty bound 
to our ally." And further: "We have emphatically 
taken the standpoint that no civilized state has the 
right, in this fight against uncivilization and political 
thug-morality, to fall upon Austria and to protect 
Servia from her just punishment." 

Assume she did not, then that is conceivable only 
in this fashion: namely, that Austria made a mis- 
take with respect to the plans of the Entente, — 
whether the mistake was due to the incapacity of 
her diplomats, or whether to intentional misleading 
on the part of Russia. The last supposition is quite 
in accord with what has become known, now and 
then, as to the methods of Russian diplomacy; but 
is yet of such a dreadfully serious sort that we have 
no right, in justice, to make it on the evidence of 
the available data. 

Yet, in passing, let me note No. 33 of the British 
"White Book," from which it appears that on July 
26 the English embassy at Berlin sent a dispatch 
to Grey that the German ambassador at St. Peters- 
burg had informed his government that the Russian 
minister had said "that if Austria annexed bits of 

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BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

Servian territory Russia wouldn't remain indiffer- 
ent." And then follows : "Under-Secretary of State 
drew conclusion, that Russia would not act if Aus- 
tria did not annex territory." One may well admit 
that this conclusion rests solely upon the illogical rule, 
qui dicit de uno, negat de altero, but remember, on 
the other hand, that it is customary among respectable 
people, whenever their words as a result of this 
rule make psychologically an almost inevitable false 
impression, to remove that impression by an explicit, 
equivalent explanation. And let me note, further, 
the great agitation to which — as appears from the 
English "White Book," No. 97— the German am- 
bassador at St. Petersburg fell a prey, when on 
July 30 at Minister Sassonof's it became clear to 
him that the war was unavoidable. Can this agita- 
tion have been also indignation?^ 

But in either case, whether the aggressor for a 
cause it held right, or the unintentional unleasher 
of the war under a mistake or through deception, 
I cannot see that the German- Austrian will is in this 
to be regarded as immoral. 

Let us take the most unfavorable supposition: 
Germany and Austria as willingly and wittingly ag- 
gressive, i. e., as having willed a war at this moment 



« See also English "White Book," No. 80 (July 29) : "There 
seemed to be a difficulty in making Germany believe that 
Russia was in earnest." — Whence arose the difficulty? 

[127] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

of time. The judgment upon this will depends on 
the circumstances in which they found themselves, 
and on their motives. As to the circumstances, I 
may spare the reader argument by referring directly 
to that excellent and too little regarded book of 
Herr Valter. From this he can readily remark — 
what, to be sure, for a year and a day, has been no 
secret to any well-informed individual of good wits 
— that England was now the aggressor not in a dip- 
lomatic but in a political sense. The concept ''ag- 
gressor" here begins to grow vague. He who is 
only diplomatically the aggressor can quite properly 
claim to be acting defensively, in case he is attacked 
politically. Attack is often nothing but the best 
method of defense. Melius praevenire quavi prae- 
veniri But let us ask further : what brought Eng- 
land to determine upon her aggressive politics? 
Then it's Germany over again who puts in her 
appearance as the aggressor now (merely to avail 
myself of the expression) in a biological sense: 
alone through the fact of her increasing growth 
and bloom whereby England's position as heatiis 
possidens became threatened. And, as Germany had 
no thought of yielding, that growth was the fact that 
brought England to her Entente-politics, whereby 
she understood how to use for her own ends the 
partially just claims of Russia and the idle grudge 
of France, throwing overboard the fact that the 
interests of these countries in Africa and Asia were 

[128] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

diametrically opposed to her own so that she could 
desire a great strengthening of their power quite as 
little. But a common hate brought them together. 

Was that not allowable ? Was not the other side 
united in a common alliance? I believe that, as we 
compare these two political combinations, we cannot 
be long in doubt as to the moral worth of the one 
and the moral worthlessness of the other. The 
alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary is an 
alliance of real friends who form a unity, who have 
common interests and positive ends — the defense 
and the growth of their interests. The entente of 
England, Russia and France is a combination ad hoc 
of enemies who form nothing more than a con- 
spiracy, since they have only a common hate and 
only negative ends — the destruction of another's 
prosperity. There is in Hello's Uhomme, p. 118, in 
the chapter "Le Monde" — the "world" is for Hello 
the sphere of ''tiedeur morale" — a paragraph of ex- 
traordinary appositeness for this whole contrast: 
"Unity has, we say, its parody — coalition. Men 
of the world are not friends, but they are in coali- 
tion. Unity lives by love. Coalition lives by hate. 
Men in coalition [les coalises] are private enemies 
who join together against the public enemy. Men 
of the world have a common hate, which gives them 
a common occupation which determines the central 
point of their activity." 

Would the deep and great soul who spoke these 

[129] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

words have been able to stand in these times at 
heart on the side of his own country ? Yes, it's not 
so unhkely — out of compassion for her bhndness. 

In view of this character of the coaHtion, it is 
exceedingly significant that the three "allies" found 
it necessary to sign on September 4, 1914, at Lon- 
don a declaration whereby they solemnly vowed — not 
to leave one another in the lurch! ''Difficile satiram 
non scriherey One will find the document in the 
French ''Yellow Book," No. 160. Both the place of 
the transaction and the whole ulterior purport indi- 
cate that it was an English device — which bound the 
other two unalterably to the service of England's 
own ends. It occurs to me that we have here a 
practical example of a treaty that can be morally 
abrogated 'Wehiis stantibus'' : as soon as France and 
Russia come to better insight, and see that they are 
dupes, not allies but exploited parties, then they 
will be morally justified in shattering these fetters 
with the laughter of scorn. Will Russia some day 
do so perhaps? It doesn't seem altogether incon- 
ceivable. 

"As Germany had no thought of yielding," I 
said above. Would it not have been perhaps better, 
more ethical, for the sake of peace to yield indeed, 
and to remain content in the narrow limits? No, 
because the realization of the ethical ideal required 
that this morally valuable people achieve larger 
scope. It was not allozvable for her to remain con- 

[130] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

tent. That would have been the morality of the 
cloister, the morality of the ungenuine Christianity, 
of which Goethe, perhaps the greatest Christian since 
Christ, has said: 

"Den deutschen Mannern gereicht's zum Ruhm, 
Dass sie gehasst das Christentum." 

The biological aggressiveness gets here a deep- 
ened significance: the moral aggressiveness. Gen- 
uine morality, as I've already said, is expansive, 
striving to create a divine world-order [wereld- 
vergoddelijking, ''deification of the world"]. The 
moral will must live itself out; it may not be the 
"anvil," it must be the ''hammer," or rather, it can 
be nothing else. But in this last aggressiveness lies 
also the final defense of the entire morality of the 
German cause. 

Moral worth, the positive, as opposed to moral 
worthlessness, the negative element, the empty ap- 
pearance, becomes, just like light as opposed to 
darkness, already the aggressor by its very presence, 
even though it does not intentionally take the offen- 
sive. We don't need to contend against evil; by 
doing the good we already contend against it ipso 
facto — and make it, ipso facto, our foe.^ 

6 Concerning England's political aggressiveness, see, amid 
the ocean of literature, Rudolf Kjellen's Die Grossmdchte der 
Gegenwart ["The Great Powers of the Present"], pp. 119-123, 
which quite properly insists that English politics of the last 
ten years is nothing but a repetition of a method continually 
applied, of which Edward VII was not at all the inventor but 

[131] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

Every one who sets fresh, upward-striving, worthy 
content above old, time-eaten form; every one who 
considers it vitally desirable, for the self- renewal 
and civilizing of mankind, that the undue influence 
which such form can still exercise (by virtue of 
the inveteracy of all forms) be justly reduced to the 
real proportions of the actual content — he must 
desire with all his heart victory for Germany and 
defeat for England. Both are but two sides of one 
matter. 

only the last carrier. Also in Paul Rohrbach's Der Krie^ und 
die deutsche Politik ["The War and German Politics"] one 
will find much of interest, especially touching the strained 
relations between England and Germany since 1911. He asks 
the question, as to whether the attitude of England was not a 
disguise (p. 84). In passing I think that the question can now 
be definitely answered : from the English "White Book," No. 
105, it appears that in Novermber, 1912, at the time of the 
Balkan War which so threatened German-Austrian interests 
there occurred the correspondence between Grey and the French 
ambassador at London which practically amounts almost to a 
military agreement, whilst, moreover, one thing and another 
has become known as to the maritime arrangements made with 
Russia in 1914 (cf. Gottlob Egelhaaf, Historisch-politische 
Jahresuhersicht ["Historical-Political Annual Review"], 1914, 
pp. 89-91) — all this, while negotiations were going on with 
Germany as to Central Africa and Mesopotamia, apparently in 
the most willing spirit of cooperation. For a good notion of 
German world-politics, especially of the influence thereon of 
Germany's continental position and vice versa, a most service- 
able book is: J. J. Ruedorffer's GrundsUge der Weltpolitik in 
der Gegenwart, 1914. 



[132] 



XIII. 



IN the foregoing inquiry into the diplomatic ag- 
gressiveness, no particular heed has been paid 
to the role of England. The matter lay from the 
beginning between Germany-Austria and Russia. 
Hence England assuredly did not cause the war, in 
a diplomatic sense. Yet what has been already ob- 
served above as to her political aggressiveness in- 
vites to a little closer scrutiny of her diplomatic 
role also. For, taking into account her persisting 
purpose of late years, it might well turn out that 
this role was less innocent than it seems at first 
sight. In this inquiry there is the advantage that 
England's role — since it was outside the special 
Servian question — begins in the main of itself only 
after the Austrian note and can thus be studied 
more effectively from the diplomatic correspon- 
dence.^ 

Directly after the appearance of the note, Russia 
took a decided stand against it, and Germany was 
quite as decided in her readiness to support her ally. 

1 [Cf. the analysis of Prof. J. W. Burgess, The European 
War of 19 1 4, especially pp. 1-44.] 

[133] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

It was thus immediately clear that, as soon as both 
parties should have the courage for it, war would 
inevitably come. That was forthwith the impression 
of everybody, also at London. 

It was also known on July 26 that Italy would 
remain neutral.^ 

Apart from Servia, it was thus two against two, 
with a slight advantage in strength for Germany and 
Austria. 

Hence England had the decision in her hands. 
If she declared for France and Russia, then the 
scales turned in their favor. If she declared for 
neutrality, then there was a good chance that France 
and Russia would in the end prefer to withdraw 
from the dangerous adventure, and let Austria take 
her course, under the pledges she was ready to give 
to annex no territory. 

If England, therefore, wished to prevent the war, 
she would have had to declare herself, in the one 
sense or in the other; and both parties put forth all 
their efforts to get her to do so. But now take into 
account that England could be tolerably certain that 
Germany would not respect the neutrality of Bel- 
gium, so that she was sure of a demonstrable casus 
belli, if such should eventually seem necessary, with- 
out for the present taking a definite stand. On the 
other hand, it was quite as much to be expected 
that France would not violate that neutrality: she 
2 See French "Yellow Book," No. 51. 
[134] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

would have neither adequate motive, nor the op- 
portunity by virtue of her less effective mobiliza- 
tion. Thus also on this side there was no appre- 
ciable danger that the game would be spoiled. 

So we can well say that presumably never in all 
history such vast power lay in the hands of two men 
as Messieurs Asquith and Grey possessed in those 
days before the war. They had the power, by de- 
claring themselves, to hold the war in check, or by 
keeping silent, by doing nothing, to let it burst 
forth. 

They chose, under all sorts of unsatisfactory 
pretexts, — the latter. Their misdeed, — for a purely 
destructive war merely out of self-interest is a mis- 
deed, — was a delictum omissionis [a sin of omis- 
sion.]^ When on July 24 the Austro-Hungarian 
ambassador communicated the note to London, and 
on the ver}^ same day (''White Book," No. 6) the 
English ambassador at St. Petersburg sent the dis- 
patch that in his opinion "even if we decline to join 
them, France and Russia are determined to make a 



3 D. G. Jelgersma seeks the cause in the great deference of 
the democratic English statesmen to public opinion in England 
{Gids ["The Leader"], March, 1915). As if it wasn't every- 
where known, that it is with English statesmen simply the reg- 
ular device to appeal to public opinion when they want to effect 
something against other countries or to evade their well- justi- 
fied demands (cf. Helmolt, Die geheime Vorgeschichte des 
Weltkrieges, passim). If public opinion doesn't serve their 
turn, it is quietly shelved, and the "democracy" is nothing but 
make-believe. As a matter of fact Asquith and Grey are all- 
powerful in foreign relations. 

[135] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

Strong stand," then, as I picture it, there began an 
extraordinary process in that most intricate com- 
plex which constitutes the consciousness of Sir Ed- 
ward Grey. This gentleman, Sir Edward Grey, is 
a highly polished, sensitive, kind-hearted, philan- 
thropic twentieth-century West-European, who has 
a holy aversion to bloodshed and who would behold 
with deep horror any one that, when the necessity 
arose, would not shrink from causing a European 
war; in short, he is really a pacifist. But he is a 
pacifist only in the foreground of his intricate con- 
sciousness. In the background, well-nigh in his sub- 
consciousness, he is himself England's conscious- 
ness; and that consciousness has been for years 
completely preoccupied with the unheard-of fact 
that somewhere on the continent there appears to 
have arisen a barbaric people that threatens Eng- 
land's world-empire, or at least, in England's eyes, 
appears to threaten it.* Now on July 24, 1914, 
that sub-consciousness, like Hamlet, saw a ghost, 

* In a remarkable romance of H. G. Wells, The Passionate 
Friends, 1913, I, p. 191, a father says to his son, in a conversa- 
tion on trade-politics, in which the latter cites the example of 
the Germans : "Fancy quoting the Germans ! When I was a 
boy, there weren't any Germans. They came up after 70." 
This is the whole affair. It is simply a repetition of Rome vs. 
Carthage. Germany's single misdeed is that she — exists. The 
situation of before Bismarck's day must be restored. The 
romance-writer, Paul Bourget, makes his entrance into politics 

by openly announcing this and by giving as his grounds 

the value of small states (King Albert's Book, page 183). 
Shouldn't France have to be, at the same time, dissolved into 
her historic components, O glorious enfant terrible of the En- 
tente ? 

[136] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

the ghost of Edzvard VII ; and this ghost spake 
thus : "Hora est. Bethink thee of it, now I desire 
my petite guerre. Thou needest do naught, — just 
let things take their course." 

As a result, there arose in the foreground a stren- 
uous bustle about all sorts of petty expedients and 
schemes, conferences at London, steps taken at 
Berlin, mediation of England and Italy, incitements 
to moderation from Berlin to Vienna, direct "con- 
versations" between Vienna and St. Petersburg; but 
all that was only comedy, the puppet-play, the whi- 
tening of the sepulcher, — in good Dutch, '7anV en 
koiide driikte'' [''Fiddle-faddle and the big noise" — 
''in good American"]. The one real thing, was the 
voice of the ghost. And the ghost was not alto- 
gether contented with the course events were tak- 
ing. There was, indeed, a slight weakness in the 
entire scheme : the balance of power, as left to itself, 
was tipping in the wrong direction. What, then, to 
do? A slight pressure must be applied on the oppo- 
site end of the beam. The ghost urged to that; 
but the fore-part of Sir Edward's consciousness 
opposed : In this way, verily, it would be working 
for war, and it was working, precisely all the while, 
zealously, and on all sides, for peace (see, however, 
"White Book," No. 47). 

Then did this fore-part of Sir Edward's con- 
sciousness and the ghost of Edward VII, by way 
of agreement, together concoct one of the most dex- 

[137] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

terous diplomatic sleights which have ever been ex- 
hibited : encouragement for the Entente was to take 
the form of . . . .a kindly warning to Germany. On 
July 29 it was given. Let one read in the English 
''White Book," No. 89, that most friendly, most 
benevolent conversation, inspired by the noblest of 
motives. In sober truth, that conversation was 
morally equivalent to the drinking cup which the 
guests of Caesar Borgia used to get, for. .. .the 
plan of holding it — the German ambassador had 
assurances it was "quite private" — had been be- 
forehand, that morning in fact, communicated to the 
French ambassador (English ''White Book," No. 
87).^ Inasmuch as the French position would be- 
come, through that conversation, not weaker but 
precisely stronger, it cannot possibly have been in- 
tended as a warning to France. And if the warn- 
ing was to take effect on Germany, it was necessary 
to give it a strictly confidential character; since 
Germany could with difficulty retire before Eng- 
land openly, i. c, in full view of the other Entente 
powers, — but, at a pinch, doubtless, if the real cir- 
cumstances remained secret.^ 



^ The same day France gave Russia definitely the promise of 
unconditional support (Russian "Orange Book," No. 55 and 
No. 58) and the following day they were convinced at St. 
Petersburg that England was cooperating (letter of Baron de 
I'Escaille). 

^ Here is a point for the consideration of those who plead 
for the greater publicity of diplomatic business. 

[138] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

Every prosecuting attorney^ is acquainted with 
the phenomenon of the higher sort of criminal, who, 
after having constructed with great intelHgence and 
caution a whole complicated scheme to send justice 
off on a false scent, makes almost invariably a small 
slip in some minor point, that may seem afterwards, 
in the light of the whole case, almost unbelievable in 
its stupidity. This phenomenon is very easy to com- 
prehend : it is simply a result of the fact that the 
system did not grow organically in the world of 
reality, but was mechanically pieced together in 
empty space by the understanding; and the human 
understanding has certain admitted weaknesses — it 
overlooks and it forgets. 

I see a little slip of this sort in the inclusion of 
the beginning of document No. 87 in the English 
*'White Book." Speaking from the English stand- 
point, it ought not to have been there. History 
will sometime, principally on ground of this very 
document, call England to account for her conduct 
and she will find it hard to reply. 

Herewith the game was played. The war be- 
tween Germany-Austria and Russia-France could 
begin. The ghost of Edward VH withdrew con- 
tented to the heavenly abodes. Now the matter 
had gone so far. Sir Edward could handle it alone 

^ [Rechter van instructie, in the Dutch Code-Napoleon, doesn't 
correspond exactly to any legal official in American law-courts.] 

[139] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

for the future. His better part could found no 
more evil. 

The question for England was now only this: 
shall we take a hand or not?^ The question might 
be answered only after the outbreak of the war. 
Germany must still be left to suppose there was a 
chance of England's neutrality. Moreover, she 
could naturally get no exact promise of this, on 
whatever conditions, for then the other party would 
perhaps take in sail. Therefore, England might not 
say explicitly what she would do if the Belgian 
neutrality, as was to be expected, was disregarded. 
Moreover, here is a slight flaw in the English scheme : 
that which on August 4 was called (and is still 
unceasingly called) an atrocious outrage, seemed on 
August 1 (English ''White Book," No. 123), at 
the most, indeed a highly serious affair, but not 
definitely furnishing a casus belli. It is difficult 
to read the last two sentences of document No. 123 
without aversion. Germany stood on the verge of 
the great war and the upshot of her question was 
really if England would perhaps be so good as not 
to hit her in the back too. For this favor she was 
ready to make far-reaching, well-nigh impossible 
concessions. But she desired certainty; she desired 
in any case to know where she was ; she desired not 



8 The answer was naturally not a mere matter of course, for 
England is the last to desire a too great strengthening of 
Russia and France. 

[140] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

to be perpetually exposed to the chance that England 
in her own good time, would begin too. She stood, 
to use the fit word, virtually more or less as a 
suppliant before England. The world is so curi- 
ously arranged that one can often do nothing but 
supplicate, even for perfectly proper and reasonable 
things, and supplicate mostly in vain, in the pres- 
ence of our moral inferiors who happen to be the 
more powerful. I seem to hear the honest German 
voice asking, was there then no means at all of 
obtaining, not England's neutrality, but only Eng- 
land's frankness, — since a people in such circum- 
stances has a right to frankness. But Sir Edward 
Grey, the pacifist, was not the man to be tenderly 
moved : "1 could only say that we must keep our 
hands free." The sword of Damocles always over 
Germany's head — that was the intention! And 
yet there are still people who find it "clumsy" of 
Germany that by this violation of Belgian neutral- 
ity she made England her foe too! As if a neutral 
England were to be trusted for an instant during 
the whole course of the war, and as if it were not 
much better that she were forthwith induced to 
come out into the open. This put at least an end 
to all uncertainty and to the chance that, at some 
moment most inopportune for Germany, there would 
suddenly arise one or another "legal cause" which 
w^ould induce righteous England (who had on 
August 2 given France the unconditional promise 

[141] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

of guarding her coast) to her deepest sorrow to 
enter the Hsts. 

I hesitate no longer for a moment in my ethical 
judgment upon the role of England; and I attach 
some value to it, since my first impression was 
otherwise. My final judgment, however, is entirely 
in agreement with that which the whole German peo- 
ple have, with instinctive certainty, passed upon her.^ 

We are wont to speak of the mob-blindness of 
Germany on this point and to be grandiloquently 
astonished that even her aristocracy of intellect has 
not escaped it. We forget that a judgment is not 
necessarily unjust, because it is the judgment of a 
whole people. We can, for all that, examine the 
content of the judgment independently. And there 
exists, for all that, still something or other like a vox 
popidi, vox Dei. This exists when the speaker is not 
the erring intelligence of the few and the imitation 
of the many, but the folk-soul itself. The German 
folk-soul has now found such a voice. It is the 
Mene Tekel of England, albeit she sees for the 
present forsooth — a good ten years after the Boer 
War — her chance still to parade before the world as 
the guardian of international law and small nations. 
Mundusvidt decipi. Therefore England, thischerisher 
of forms, has always sailed under a false flag, just 



® See, e. g., Wilhelm Dibelius, England und wir ; Georg 
Irmer,^ Los vom englischen Weltjoch ; Jacob Riesser, England 
und wir] Arthur Dix, Der Weltwirtschaftskrieg. 

[142] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

as she now in a literal sense is beginning to do. She 
has been, through all modern history, the Mephis- 
topheles of the continent, the destroyer of all which 
became vigorous over there and so stood in the way 
of her self-interest. But the end will show. Mephis- 
topheles is 

"Ein Teil der Kraft, 
Die stets das Bose will und stets das Gute schafft," 

and so he falls himself at last into the pit which he 
digged for another. 



1143] 



XIV. 



THUS this war, which could have been — what- 
ever besides — at least an honorable strife, has 
become, through the participation of England — and 
Japan! — a murderous ambuscade [a French expres- 
sion, guet-apens]. Will Germany sustain the test? 
Will she succumb to superior physical strength? 

It is an illusion to suppose that moral right always 
triumphs. Napoleon's remark that God is always 
on the side of the heaviest cannon is nothing else 
than blasphemy — a proof of how shallow was the 
inner life of this Genius of Action. Moral right 
is a spring of great potency; it is by no means in- 
different in a contest of physical power. But equally 
true it is that God cannot make head against un- 
limited cannon. It is precisely one of the hardest 
and deepest problems of the world-tragedy that 
moral right certainly does not always win the vic- 
tory. A genuinely ethical philosophy of life cannot 
be other then tragi-heroic. 

But one thing we do know : moral right can be 
beaten, but it cannot be slain, cannot be annihilated. 
It is a fact, a reality; and facts are not to be elim- 

[144] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

inated from the world. Only moral wrong, the 
nothing that appears something, the empty appear- 
ance, can be annihilated. 

Human memory is a strange thing. From out 
what queer hiding-places does the power of associa- 
tion sometimes bring our slumbering ideas to light! 
Whilst I've been meditating during these last months 
over the war and its origin, and saw in my mind's 
eye the awful possibility that Germany might not be 
able to hold her own, there came back to my spirit, 
from years and years ago, a little German song, a 
simple song, but unutterably pure and deep, such as 
is only to be found in the German tongue. That 
little song was sung on a relatively small occasion, 
which had, however, in form great similarity with 
the world-event of to-day ; and all words spoken by 
human beings depend for their worth and greatness 
more on the worth and greatness of the speaker 
than on the worth and greatness of the occasion. 
Thus I could fancy I heard in this song a prophecy 
of the whole story of to-day, and a clear indication, 
too, of how Germany under a possible defeat would 
hold to herself. I will transcribe it entire. Per- 
haps there is one or another reader whose soul 
appreciates what deep emotions have stirred the 
German people — and with that people, the present 
writer — in these last months. I refer to the song of 
August von Binzer, which was sung at Jena, No- 
vember 26, 1819, on the occasion of the dissolving 

[145] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

of the "Burschenschafty^ Each word has now for 
me a purport deep and unutterably great ; the whole 
is, indeed, wrought of blood and tears, great in its 
unconquerable self-reliance. It is as if the eternal 
historic becoming, the eternal shaping and shatter- 
ing of forms, the whole tragedy of human history, 
there achieved expression. 

"Wir hatten gebauet 
Ein stattliches Haus, 
Und drin auf Gott vertrauet 
Trotz Wetter, Sturm und Graus. 

"Wir lebten so traulich, 
So einig, so frei, 

Den Schlechten ward es graulich, 
Wir hielten gar zu treu ! 

"Sie lugten, sie suchten 
Nach Trug und Verrat, 
Verleumdeten, verfluchten 
Die junge, griine Saat. 

"Was Gott in uns legte, 
Die Welt hat's veracht't; 
Die Einigkeit erregte 
Bei Guten selbst Verdacht. 

"Man schalt es Verbrechen, 
Man tauschte sich sehr : 
Die Form kann man zerbrechen, 
Die Liebe nimmermehr. 

"Die Form ist zerbrochen, 
Von aussen herein ; 
Doch, was man drin gerochen, 
Ist eitel Dunst und Schein. 

1 ["Student Society," founded in 1815 for patriotic purposes.] 
[146] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

"Das Band ist zerschnitten, 
War Schwartz, Rot und Gold, 
Und Gott hat es gelitten : 
Wer weiss, was Er gewollt! 

"Das Haus mag zerfallen, — 
Was hat's denn fur Not? 
Der Geist lebt in uns Allen, 
Und unsre Burg ist Gott!" 

[The translator, realizing the great significance 
of these stanzas for the spiritual argument, has done 
his poor best to make them available for readers 
ignorant of German. 

"We builded together 
The stateliest house, 
And there, through wind and weather. 
Had made our God our vows. 

"We lived there so truesome. 
So friendly, so free, 
The base folk found it gruesome 
That men so true should be ! 

"They waited, they prated 
Of treason and fraud. 
Reviled and execrated 
The green, young seed of God. 

"What God in us planted 
The world did despise; 
Even good men doubting scanted 
Our league and enterprise. 

"They plotted a matter 
They wotted not of — 
The Form can all men shatter, 
But nevermore the Love! 

[147] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

"The form has been shattered, 
From outward the blow — 
But what their hands have scattered 
Is empty smoke and show. 

'The Ribbon's been sHtted, 
The Red, Gold and Jet, 
And God he has permitted : 
Who knows what God wills yet! 

"The House may go under, — 
What matters the hour? — 
The Soul is not to sunder, 
And God is still our tower!"] 

Let us rest assured: if the German people is in- 
deed what we hold it to be, then its present **form" 
can be shattered by external, mechanical violence; 
but then it will create for itself in its own good 
time, purified by suffering, a newer form, still more 
beautiful and more mighty. "The swiftest beast 
that carries ye to perfection is suffering" (Eckhart). 



[148] 



XV. 



AFTER all this about Belgian neutrality, the 
^ reader will permit me to conclude with a word 
about our own. I believe that the case of Belgium 
contains a serious lesson for ourselves. 

I will express no judgment about our neutrality. 
To do so publicly — intus ut libet — is forbidden by 
one's duty as citizen. Moreover, it is presum- 
ably sufficiently clear from the foregoing discussion 
how I regard the "dignity" of our impartial atti- 
tude.^ The man who could pronounce that word 
was filled with petty vanity, with the calm, intellec- 
tual, unpresuming, intolerable vanity of the scholar; 
and had no conception of the warm, strong and 
living, of the pressing and driving, the creative 
feeling for moral values and the differences between 
moral values : his soul was cold. A mere pupil 
forever, he is and he remains hide-bound in ethical 
and esthetic formalism, because at Groningen no- 
body has told him that these functions have also a 
material side which is immensely more important. 

1 Cf. R. Casimir, Waardige onzijdigheid ["Dignified Impar- 
tiality"]. 

[1491 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

"Vanity! This odious personage is all in these two 
words: coldness and vanity!" (Hello, Uhomme, 
chapter, ''L'homme mediocre," p. 67.) 

Quite as little will I discuss the queer and some- 
what comical phenomenon that has just now started 
up here at home — this new growth of pacifism 
that is now and then itself somewhat aggressive. 
We might call it the ethical parallel of the estheti- 
cism of a man like Albert Verwey :^ ethical and 
esthetic illusionism. 

All these things spring from the inner discontent, 
from the need of doing something or other, or of 
taking some sort of an attitude. It seems to me 
that the stiller we keep and the less we extol our 
neutrality the more honest the idea we give of our 
true position and attitude. 

I venture only to speak an earnest word as to 
what our action should be, should our neutrality 
become endangered, — whether from one side or the 
other. There are then two ways possible ; and I am 
not so sure that our state, which is intelligent, will 
then give proof that she is more than intelligent, — 
that she is wise. 

^ Beweging ["Movement," edited by Verwey], Dec. 1914, p. 
177: "Precisely now, precisely in opposition to this horrible 
exertion of power of the material (?) and political world, 
must Poesy and Idea be that world's foe in the world, and 
vindicate their independence therefrom." As if "Poesy and 
Idea" could fetch their content from any source at all but the 
rational-ethical reality of human life ! As if it was not in this 
way alone that they can become strong and deep! 

[150] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

The first way is this: as impersonal logical ma- 
chines to deduce our conclusion from the arti- 
ficial, lifeless, and deceitful abstractions of interna- 
tional law, according to the syllogism: our neutral 
territory is inviolable; here is warring power A, 
which will not — cannot! — respect the inviolability; 
warring power A is thus our enemy. That is the 
method of the apprentice in magic: 

"Die ich rief, die Geister, 
Werd' ich nun nicht los." 

The second way is this : when the time comes, 
as living and creative personalities to bring forth 
our conclusion for ourselves from our own choice; 
in other words, whoever the "violator" be, to show 
our colors, to chose our party, and to gather to 
that side which is really ours. 

I see with satisfaction that Professor Kernkamp 
in Vragen des Tijds, March number, has had the 
same thought. But what is unfortunately missing 
is the decisive choice in the right direction. It is, 
I am firmly convinced, at the present moment the 
duty of all Hollanders who think farther and deeper 
and have the real good of ther fatherland at heart, 
to do their share in spreading just views, in harmony 
with reality, concerning the great problem, England- 
Germany — views grounded not upon subjective fac- 
tors, but upon facts and their logical-ethical impli- 
cations. This is not contrary to political "neutral- 

[151] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

ity," and for the government it can be nothing but 
desirable to have light on what is going on among 
the best of the people. It has very properly re- 
quested the daily press to refrain from political ob- 
servations. Papers like the Telegraaf and the ear- 
lier^ Amsterdammer show well enough to what pass 
things would have come otherwise — not to men- 
tion the noble guild of Writers-of-letters-to-the- 
editor {de ingezonden-sHikken-schrijvers!'\. Yet, let 
those who are really abreast of things — I fear 
their number is small — have the courage to speak, 
now there is still time."^ And let them continue 
in their labor, even after peace is declared, for 
then — no matter who wins — the question of a Mid- 
European League or at least of a Customs-Union 
will become acute, and our own vital interests will 
be involved. 

For the present, however, the question is only: 
What to do, if things should go wrong with our 
neutrality ? 

I believe that our people, especially in the lower 
intellectual circles, fancies itself to be, or to have to 
be, anti-German. But la volonte generate n'est pas 
la volonte de tous, and our form of government, 
luckily for us, has since August 1914 been more 

3 [A reference to this paper as it was before the radical 
change in its staff about the end of 1914.] 

*[Note Prof. Verrijn Stuart's excellent study De economische 
oorlog, "Economic Aspect of the War," translated in The Open 
Court, 1916.] 

[152] 



BELGIUM AND GERMANY 

nearly the intellectually aristocratic — which is the 
ideal form — than it has ever been since 1866. If 
the great hour ever comes, may such v^isdom be 
given us, that, conscious of our historic lineage and 
of the origin of our mother tongue, and obedient 
to the voice of the Germanic blood that streams, 
even though not unmixed, through our veins, we 
may realize in freedom whither our highest and 
deepest interest, whither our Duty calls us ! 



[153] 



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